In
2006 Gafar bought a
retirement flat in Pyramids then went back to Australia to do
more Pacific Islander language prehistory work. He retired a bit young
in 2008 after completing those projects and returned to Cairo April 15.
By early
2009
his friends were seriously wondering who was "taking care" of him and
helping to arrange introductions as he did, indeed, want to get married
(to someone his own age who was also about retirement age and also
wanted to tour the Arab world). "Well," said his friend Assim El Sersy.
"There's our cousin Reda who, for forty years, has said, 'No,' to every
man we have introduced her to..... but if you wanna try....." So they
were introduced on Reda's birthday, 15 April.... and sped off to get
married before letting the other get away.

The Bridewealth

A Few Days
Before
We Married

Prologue

Small Triumphs

One day in
late 2014 the bike was with the mechanic
and while my repairs were under way I walked over to the kofta
restaurant to
place an order. I was just about back to the mechanic’s cross street on
tiny
Ali Abu Zed, a market street hardly wider than the streets with just
residential ground floor frontages not six meters across from each
other. There
was a lull in the normal bustle of people filling the street and the
only thing
before me was a miniature sort of person doing battle with something
stuck to
her left foot. I couldn’t see what she was stomping on and scuffling
with even
in the bright ambiance of the street where the skylight lit her up like
floodlights
on a
stage. She looked like she was trying to get rid of a piece of flypaper
stuck
to her foot. But her new blue jeans were long and baggy and I couldn’t
see what
it was.

She
was older than just two but maybe not three as she seemed to
have diapers on under her jeans. She got rid of the obstruction,
regained her footing and got on with the
business of pressing onwards; determined, efficient, triumphant, as she
trailed
her mother who had just passed me going the other way. There was an
object
where the child had been scuffling away and as I got closer I could see
that it
was a sneaker of about the child’s size. White with pink trim like
Reda’s sneakers.
I wondered if it might be the child’s own shoe, picked it up, turned to
the
direction of the mother and child and called out, “Madame.” They were
walking
on and away but a matron coming towards me directed the child’s
mother’s
attention towards me.

She looked in
my direction and the picture I presented
was one of a largish man in the gigantic winter coat that keeps me
clean and
warm on the motorcycle, looking curiously at a child’s tiny new shoe in
my
hand. The
shoe was twinkling clean in the skylight; me gazing off in her
direction
in the middle of the otherwise empty, sky lit real estate I was
occupying;
seeming, perhaps, to be standing in floodlights as had the child when I
was
first looking at her from the same vantage point. The matron said
something to
the child’s mother who then looked quizzically down to the child.

A shoe
inventory wasn’t immediately possible because
of the child’s long, loose pant legs falling down to and covering the
toes of
both feet. While the mother was bending down and pulling up the pant
legs to
see if the child was wearing two shoes or just one, I occupied myself
by
walking towards them. Just as the mother had confirmed that there was,
indeed,
a missing shoe, I had arrived. She turned to look in my direction,
still bent
at the knees, arched downward to the child’s level and, presto, I was
standing
right before her, the tiny shoe in my hand exactly at her eye level
immediately
in front of her nose.

Completely
amused, she burst out laughing and snatched
the shoe away from me, me seeing for the first time that she was young
and
beautiful and wearing elegant clothes beneath her robe, her lips bright
red
with a dignified shade of lipstick exposing gleaming, perfect teeth. I
turned
and walked back in the direction of the mechanic’s shop, enchanted by a
cheerful memory of Ali Abu Zed Street for the day. A cool winter day.

Christmas
Day, 2014, in the Western Church.

Prologue

Small Triumphs

One day in
late 2014 the bike was with the mechanic
and while my repairs were under way I walked over to the kofta
restaurant to
place an order. I was just about back to the mechanic’s cross street on
tiny
Ali Abu Zed, a market street hardly wider than the streets with just
residential ground floor frontages not six meters across from each
other. There
was a lull in the normal bustle of people filling the street and the
only thing
before me was a miniature sort of person doing battle with something
stuck to
her left foot. I couldn’t see what she was stomping on and scuffling
with even
in the bright ambiance of the street where the skylight lit her up like
floodlights
on a
stage. She looked like she was trying to get rid of a piece of flypaper
stuck
to her foot. But her new blue jeans were long and baggy and I couldn’t
see what
it was.

She
was older than just two but maybe not three as she seemed to
have diapers on under her jeans. She got rid of the obstruction,
regained her footing and got on with the
business of pressing onwards; determined, efficient, triumphant, as she
trailed
her mother who had just passed me going the other way. There was an
object
where the child had been scuffling away and as I got closer I could see
that it
was a sneaker of about the child’s size. White with pink trim like
Reda’s sneakers.
I wondered if it might be the child’s own shoe, picked it up, turned to
the
direction of the mother and child and called out, “Madame.” They were
walking
on and away but a matron coming towards me directed the child’s
mother’s
attention towards me.

She looked in
my direction and the picture I presented
was one of a largish man in the gigantic winter coat that keeps me
clean and
warm on the motorcycle, looking curiously at a child’s tiny new shoe in
my
hand. The
shoe was twinkling clean in the skylight; me gazing off in her
direction
in the middle of the otherwise empty, sky lit real estate I was
occupying;
seeming, perhaps, to be standing in floodlights as had the child when I
was
first looking at her from the same vantage point. The matron said
something to
the child’s mother who then looked quizzically down to the child.

A shoe
inventory wasn’t immediately possible because
of the child’s long, loose pant legs falling down to and covering the
toes of
both feet. While the mother was bending down and pulling up the pant
legs to
see if the child was wearing two shoes or just one, I occupied myself
by
walking towards them. Just as the mother had confirmed that there was,
indeed,
a missing shoe, I had arrived. She turned to look in my direction,
still bent
at the knees, arched downward to the child’s level and, presto, I was
standing
right before her, the tiny shoe in my hand exactly at her eye level
immediately
in front of her nose.

Completely
amused, she burst out laughing and snatched
the shoe away from me, me seeing for the first time that she was young
and
beautiful and wearing elegant clothes beneath her robe, her lips bright
red
with a dignified shade of lipstick exposing gleaming, perfect teeth. I
turned
and walked back in the direction of the mechanic’s shop, enchanted by a
cheerful memory of Ali Abu Zed Street for the day. A cool winter day.

Christmas
Day, 2014, in the Western Church.

Letters to Family and Friends:

19
April 2009 – gold rush

I
have wanted to get married for some months,
since before leaving Australia
last year, really, and have had introductions to some lovely women. But
they
were all 10 and 20 years younger than me. I wanted to marry someone who
personally
experienced the Gamal Abdel Nasser years and also had her own personal
memories
of American activities in the region and would understand my memories
as an
age-mate and my decision to retire to Cairo.

Assim,
my good friend from a nearby
neighborhood, has a cousin, Reda, who is a wee bit younger than me. We
were
formally introduced at Assim’s home four days ago and Reda and I are
getting
married ASAP – flank speed, kind of. Only certain things will cause
delays – finding
and fixing up a flat for the moment. She initially said she’d be happy
to get
married immediately, move in with me (she had seen my apartment), then
look
for something bigger over time. But yesterday or so she decided we
should find,
furbish and furnish a bigger place before the wedding. So I bought her
a Nokia and, since last night, we are on stand-by to look at
prospective flats as
agents bring them to our attention.

Reda’s
an electrical engineer with
the telephone company. Maybe not an EE but both she and her sister have
degrees
of some kind. The sister was a school teacher but is a bit older and
retired
two or three years ago. They live together with the sister’s
20-year-old son from
a short marriage years ago, raising the sister’s son together for the
last 18
years, if I understood correctly.

Last
night I bought Reda the gold
which seals engagements in this part of the world. Under $2000. Like a
lot of other people. The marriage contracts are registered and attract
high fees if there is more gold than that involved. Once we’ve signed a
lease, the wedding contract will be next. Always chirpy, Reda’s taken
to holding hands
for brief periods since she got her gold – when crossing the street
last night
after leaving the gold shop, later then at Assim’s house after she
opened the
gift wrapped cell phone box, and for a long moment as Assim and I were
saying
good-night when we dropped her home. This is all pretty formal stuff. I
shouldn’t
give her the phone or any other present until I gave her the gold. She
wouldn’t
let a hand-shake linger until she got the gold. We’re always chaperoned
heavier
than in the Godfather, etc., etc. We will get married the day the
"house" (beyt - "house or
apartment; home") is
ready to move into which would seem to be within a month.

Residential
construction is years
ahead of occupancy here due to the Egyptian and general Muslim
preference to
put money into property development rather than interest bearing
accounts and
instruments. So there are thousands of empty flats right where we want
to live…
shells of buildings whose individual flats then see their interiors
finished
off as the market is able to absorb them. We’re looking for a flat in
the
middle of a triangle between Assim’s place, Reda’s
present place and the little flat I bought four years ago. $150 a month
will
get us about 150 sq metres (~1500 sq feet). Renting out my 45 sq metre
flat will
bring us about half that. So somehow I have to come up with $75 to top
off our
rent each month. Problems, problems, problems.

The
gold was a worry when I walked
home from our negotiations Friday night. I’m not really cashed up at
the
moment. But then there came the offer of work from New Zealand… an 80
year old
anthropologist’s language notes on a New Guinea area language that are
quite
extensive and substantial enough to be worked into a dictionary by a
linguist
familiar with the language family, the dictionary softwares, etc.

Friends
and acquaintances from this
side of town were blind-sided that I’m going to marry one of “them” and
not a 40
year old from the rich side of town or something – that I’m content
with them
as my main amigos and compańeros, I guess. It’s been delightful and
gives me a
lot of contentment as I think of the future. Reda’s name means
“contentment,” actually.

21
April 2009 – house hunting

I
found quite a nice flat very near Assim’s
house early this afternoon. Reda has agreed that we will take it if it
passes
her inspection. $175 for, perhaps, 130 sq m. It becomes available 1 May
so we
will probably be married about the 2nd or 3rd. It isn’t going to need a
lot of
fixing up but Reda and her sister will want to give it a good, somewhat
ritual cleaning. Then they will be there off and on for some days
before the the
wedding to receive the furniture etc.

A
wedding gift of gold is emergency
money for them.
“For you… 10,000 (Egyptian),” Reda’s smiling words to me when asked how
much
gold she was demanding. I don’t understand precisely yet, but there
are no civil marriages
in Egypt.
Only registration of marriage contracts from church, mosque or
synagogue. The
registration fee is covered as part of an imam’s overall service:
negotiation of the
contract between the bride and groom’s families and registration of the
marriage contract with the government. We will end up paying the imam
LE 1,500 (~$275) for
everything – his fee including the contract registration fee. Not,
perhaps, all precisely correct but
my understanding of it as I sit and write this evening.

23
April 2009 – the chess game continues

We
were to have had a viewing of the $175 place
on Assim’s street which was set up for yesterday afternoon but when we
got there
– Reda,
her sister Zuba, the nephew Mahmoud, Assim, myself and others – they
couldn’t
produce the key for the flat as the current occupant didn’t arrive back
from
out of town by the time he said he would. Which cheesed us off a bit
because it
was a well orchestrated project to get all those people there at the
appointed
time.

Reda
found the place we then saw
last night. It’s a bit beyond the main part of Pyramids suburb and we
decided
to take it. The area has its own name which I haven’t learned yet. It’s
all
new (20 or 30 years or less?), all built to a plan surrounded by
wide
avenues compared to
the narrow roads of Assim’s, Reda’s and my own current neighborhoods in
the Faisal
and Pyramids sub-suburbs of the more enormous region also called
“Pyramids”.
Its units were sold exclusively(?) to members of the armed forces and
they now are said to rent them out or to have sold them or to be saving
them
for their children’s use upon marriage just as often as they are
inhabited by the
owners. It’s closer to the pyramids than my present home and
the
pyramids loom large on the near horizon from our new neighborhood. THE
pyramids and our apartment complex are
on the Giza Plateau which rises some hundred or hundreds of metres
above the Nile floodplain which
extends right to the edge of where
the Sphinx and pyramids are built up on the higher elevations of the
plateau.
So we are up on a hill where Assim’s house, Reda’s house and my own
house are
on the floodplain (which saw no home construction except, as I
presently
understand it, seasonal farm houses which were annually flooded along
with the
farms’ fields before the building of the Aswan Dam).

The
place Reda found is only 6 or
800 metres from the telephone company facility where she works:
“Central Remaya” – “central” in
Egyptian seems always and
only to refer to the central district telephone exchange offices. To me
it
didn’t much matter where we lived (in this part of town) because I will
be
motorcycling into work at the hotel every morning before rush hour. So
Reda’s
over the moon and so am I, really. The places are both bigger and
cheaper out
there. Our rent is to be LE550, precisely $100 a month, and the little
place I
own will be rented to the neighbour’s son for LE275 so somehow I have
to come
up with $50 a month to keep a roof over our heads.

So
we’ve got 165 sq m with three
bedrooms and three balconies for $100 a month instead of 120 sq m with
2
bedrooms and no balconies for $150 had we stayed within the Pyramids
floodplain
neighborhoods where we presently live.

This
will require more furnishings
than I have which will come over time. The only thing Reda said she
wanted
beyond what furniture I have was a new bedroom set. Assim took me out
last
night to a very flash used furniture place where all the wardrobes
started at $1,000
and was talking as if it would be me who would be buying all this
stuff. I
began seeing spots before my eyes and had to go home.

In
the end it doesn’t matter much.
Reda finally wants to get married. Her family is relieved and joyousand
we’re all a bit rich in this part of town
anyway. Me because I speak English and can always get some kind of job.
Assim
with his hotel. And Reda with her job and properties. The properties
seem to be
a mix of vacant lands she and her sister bought over the last 30 years
or
something – and the building they put up and live in (a mosque on the
ground
floor and then five apartments in five stories above it where they rent
out the
four floors they don’t live in).

Reda
and her sister are first
generation Cairo women (from El Menya
250 km
south of here on the Nile in “Upper Egypt”
["up" the Nile]) whose
father saw to their higher education at a time when many men didn’t. He
was
some kind of businessman from Alexandria.
And his daughters did well in the city. They bought several vacant
properties and built
their own apartment building, at any rate.

I
don’t know if they grew up in
the farming villages outside El Menya or in El Menya proper or in mixed
farm / larger
village areas or what. But they’re still farm girls. They have, for
instance,
lovely furniture in their large flat but have never had a refrigerator.
Perhaps
they figure a thoughtful householder can plan her food purchases and
meal
preparation without need of one. But Reda seems glad I’ll be bringing
one
along. She had a happy smile on her face as she glanced at it in her
formal
visit to my house some days ago (to take inventory of what she wants me
to bring
and what she wants me to leave behind). As it turns out, nothing will
be left
behind. With the third bedroom in the place we are renting, we will
bring my
rickety bed and other bedroom stuff to make a guest bedroom and the
second
bedroom will be an office / sewing room.

Off
to play chess with Assim, who
continues to pave the way for the next day as he organises information
for these
evening rendezvous where news of what I will be doing the next day
unfolds.

24
April 2009 – snicker

Well,
we’ve got our $100 dollar a
month flat. We paid the first month’s rent, a deposit, a month’s rent
“commission”
to the doorman who informed Reda of the empty flat when she asked some
days ago
if he knew of anything… and $80 to local dignitaries who came to meet
us,
including the policeman who is routinely called in to begin the
mandatory background
checks of new residents when units are rented. (I would learn over time
that such gatherings essentially eliminate any of the parties to the
agreement making false claims about the agreement over time).

But
we can’t have the key to the
place until we’re married.

The
chaperones took a big step
backwards – after the lease was signed by Reda and the money mentioned
in it
handed over by me to the landlord – and left us to go off by ourselves
to look
at furniture.

The
imams don’t work on marriage
contracts on Fridays so all we are doing tomorrow is going out in the
evening
to look at furniture again. What we saw tonight after the lease
business was
the same as what had me so dizzy last night. But tonight I found out
the $1000
wardrobe was actually a $1000 complete bedroom set. So I think I’m
going to
squeak through somehow.

Target
of Tuesday for the wedding is probably still possible. Marriage
contract on Saturday, apparently.

Reflections 30 May 2016

I had wanted to
marry someone who would remember President Gamal
Abdel
Nasser and the 1967 war and I did very well indeed.

Abdel Nasser came to their school when Reda was a little girl and
shook their hands. He told them he was glad their parents were sending
them to school, especially the girls. And he told them that if they
stayed in school and then got higher education credentials, there would
be a job waiting for them with the government.

Reda did those things and all that he had said came true for her. Of
course decades of government job guarantees for people with higher
education certificates led to a bloated bureacracy and the inability of
the government to pay a living wage to all who entered public service.
But Reda had earned an electrical technician certificate and was hired
by Egyptian Telecom right out of her AE program.

Government-owned Egyptian Telecom has now been operating for over
160 years, and has its own income stream and positive cash flow. So her
wages increased rather than shrank.

Like a lot of 35 old Egyptian women today, she got a good education,
she got a good job, and hadn't yet married.

The contemporary malingerers were the subject of lively humor in the
press before the revolution. After all, Muslim men are under serious
pressure to marry by the time they are 35. But with no Koranic
admonitions that they must, such women are simply free to go on and on
not doing so; often to their parents' astonishment and constirnation.
But all laughter ended during the revolution and even to some extent up
to now.

A woman with options whose misgivings about marriage 35 years ago
led to availing themselves of those options was rare, or is today
rarely mentioned. Males socialize entirely with other men and no one my
age would ever mention a never-married sister if they had one.

Reda had options because of her income; and took them year after
year. A bit of a pathfinder.

She and her sister Zuba built a small neighborhood mosque about 25
years ago with an apartment for themselves on top of it. They added
four more apartments, each on top of the other floor before I met them
and another one and a half since. Like the foundation, the mosque and
the
floors that came after, Reda watched the day labor while every batch of
concrete was mixed and every brick was laid... her being technocrat
(Zuba was a private school teacher).

Ducks, chickens, geese, pidgeons and other fowl grace the unrooved
part of the seventh floor. I built a lot of the cages for them.

So it isn't the goat on the roof of the Naguib Mahfouz Cairo trilogy
but
we see lots of them as we look down and around on the rooves of the
buildings that are still lower than theirs. There is almost no wet
garbage that goes down to the street. It all goes to the roof.

In any event, I
drive Reda over there every day at about 4PM as the traffic soon
becomes worse and then I dash home before it becomes worse yet. There
she stays into the evening feeding the critters and cleaning their pens
and cages. I pick her up at about 10:30 PM after working through the
evening on copy editing projects and going to Ibrahim The Painter's
shop for a cup of tea at about 9.
We have a meal when we get home then I do more editing and she watches
TV until about 4AM when we retire. We get up for the noon prayer and
Reda spends the afternoon cooking and doing other housework while I do
my afternoon copy editing or video editing.

As invariable as
the seasons. Old retired people at last.
Or if Reda has spent the night at Zuba's I go to Ibrahim's shop at
about noon as that is when the children are let out of school (they
start at 6AM before the morning rush hour) and we video the street life
as the children and young families start to pass by for the afternoon.

25 April 2009 – something she liked

We finished off our
furniture adventure all at once today.
Reda finally found something she liked. The installment plan.

So we got truckloads
of nice, moderately priced furniture. I
can’t guess where she’s going to put it all but our place is 165 sq. m.
so who
knows. At the last moment we got a second “solon” set (couch, love seat
and two
chairs) which was all overstuffed rather than the more formal set that
was
first on Reda’s list. It looked more comfortable than the more
expensive set
and she seems to want it to make one of the bedrooms into a ladies’
sitting
room or something. I could afford to agree to it as it would just add
$100 a
month to our six months of payments.

I’m signed up for the
joint Aussie/Kiwi ANZAC Day ceremonies
at the Commonwealth War Cemetery. I have to be there for sunrise,
leaving about
six hours from now.

We go to the Ministry
of Justice on Monday, as all
foreigners must, to clear the administrative requirements for getting
married.
We were shooting for Tuesday or Wednesday but got the flat and
furniture
already so now we do the Muslim marriage contact and its registration
and then there will be the wedding party Monday evening or Tuesday or
something, a big noisy event in Reda’s neighborhood.

27 April 2009 – magnificence

Yesterday ended
magnificently after a troubled start.

It began with Reda
taking the day off to receive the new
furniture and the doorman then refusing to open up the place for us
(because we’re
not married). So we tried to get married, instead, and dressed up and
went
downtown. Registering a marriage involving a foreigner requires doing
so at the
Ministry of Justice which told us we had to first start at the
Australian consulate
and get a standard sort of certificate saying the embassy has no
objection. So
we went down (river) to the embassy and had a cuppa at the Hilton next
door
while we waited for 1:30 pm and the consul to be available.

The consular officer
just about soiled her britches when I had
to ask Reda the rest of her name. Reda Mohamed Mahmoud Hassan El Masry.

Then we found out I will have to
produce a certified copy of
my Australian divorce (which I don’t have) and we went off to Assim’s
hotel to
lick our wounds. Like my friends around my neighborhood, the hotel
staff is
kind of nonplussed and delighted that I would be marrying someone my
own age so
we just sat there and enjoyed the afternoon chatting with the staff
from our
throne in the reception area (see the picture at the top of this web
page of the two of us below the picture of Reda's gold).

Our matching colors were fortuitous. We hadn’t discussed the matter
before we
made our individual selections of the day.

Then came word that the watchman had
made a mistake and that
the new flat was, indeed, available to us to move furniture into. But
it was
prayer time so we lost another half-hour while hands, faces and feet
were
washed and prayers were prayed, then heading off for Pyramids in the
peak of
the rush hour and it took an hour or more to get home.

Assim’s brother, Mohamed loaded a pretty big truck at the furniture
shop while
my neighbors helped me a bit and then sent me off to the new flat to
help
receive the truck while they moved my furniture down to the street and
packed
my personal possessions, making ready for Mohamed and the truck’s
second load
from Tersa Street (the furniture retailer is on Tersa and my old flat
is just
off Tersa a kilometer or two closer to the Pyramids).

I arrived to the new
flat just in time to see the most magnificent
spectacle. At the top of the building’s rather grand entrance steps was
Reda
involved in a full blown African palaver with ten or fifteen men below,
everyone shouting at full volume when they spoke. The truck from the
furniture
store had been unloaded onto the parking lot and they were negotiating
what she
would pay them to haul everything up to the 5th floor – Reda pumping
her fist
in the air, saying she would not give a piaster more than LE10 ($2) per
man
while they were refusing to budge, shouting all at once when they
spoke,
demanding LE15. This went on for maybe half an hour until the men caved
in and
then hauled it all up to our flat in about 20 minutes, there were so
many of
them – me standing the rear guard to make sure no one nicked anything
out the
parking lot entrance way. I’ve not seen such emotion in a crowd since
1960s
anti-war demonstrations in America. Reda could have been a Viking woman
with a
shield and sword threatening a town under siege – various imagines swam
through
my mind. And she’s very short. 5 foot, maybe. Very grand that evening
in any
event.

Then the truck left and soon came back from my old place, Reda and I
sorting
the furniture into things we would keep here at the new place and
things that
would stay on the truck to go into storage at her old place. Some
things had
been left at my old place as gifts to the neighbor and his
daughters-in-law,
who ordered me off to the new place and then packed all my stuff
themselves,
and to his sons who hauled all of it down to the street along with the
furniture,
and stood guard over it on the street for a few hours waiting for the
truck and
then loading the truck.

One of my last
memories of living in my little flat involves
the neighbor’s wife and twenty-something daughter. They appeared at my
flat’s entrance
door with some of my laundry, carried it to my bedroom and were leaving
to go,
the daughter gone a moment ahead of her mother. My neighbor’s wife then
paused
at the bedpost closest to the door, clutched its top between her thumb
and
index finger and moved it as violently as she could with that light
grip. The
bed gave out a creek and a groan and we burst out laughing. Yes, it was
well
that we had just bought a new bed.

We all dragged home for the night at about 2 am, me staying with the
old
neighbors – “my” family – the people who fed me, washed my clothes,
cleaned my
house, repaired my fixtures, carried me off to the doctor once when I
was too
weak to get there myself and had four granddaughters under three to
bounce on
my knee for the last year. Their middle son – Ahmed the Magnificent –
had free
rent the year or 15 months after he got married and before I got back
from
Australia. The empty professor’s house always goes to the top student…
And
anyway, I figured if I started treating those young men like nephews,
the
father would start treating me like a brother… which he did immediately
from
when I returned to Egypt. I had introduced his son Ahmed to Assim who
immediately hired him to work at his Sara Inn a few days before I
returned to
Australia in 2006. Ahmed already had an accounting degree and would
learn the general business of running a small hotel in the
following year.

Mohamed Adel (Assim’s
brother), Mohamed Assim (Assim’s son)
and one of my “nephews” came from the old house to the new house this
morning
and we started putting beds, buffets and wardrobes together. The men
who hauled
the stuff up made no effort to keep things together that looked alike –
all
Reda could do was make sure they were keeping paths clear through the
place to
the various rooms – so all the wardrobes’, buffets’, beds’ etc. pieces
were
scattered around the house like pieces of a lot of jig-saw puzzles. We
began by
grouping things by color and age – all the old stuff from my bedroom at
the
other place taken to the new guest room and reassembled.

Reda showed up a few minutes after five when she got off work and was
able to
tell us where the other things went and what color they were and what
panes of
glass and mirrors, slabs of alabaster, etc. went with what.

I had misunderstood the second lounge/“solon” room set Reda got at the
furniture shop. She didn’t want to put the second set in one of the
bedrooms
instead of bedroom stuff (I had thought she wanted to make a woman’s
reception
room or something). She wanted the dining table in that bedroom and
wanted both
settee sets in the lounge room which now seats 14 – two couches, two
love seats
and four chairs. My office is now one wall of the guest room where my
old
bedroom furniture went. The neighbor’s wife and daughters-in-law had
washed my
Egyptian rugs and they were just gleaming, two of them (identical)
precisely
cover the lounge room floor from the front legs of the chairs etc. and
precisely match and blend the various colors of the two settee
(“solon”) sets.

Reda’s nephew, Mahmoud, then showed up and switched the lock on the
entrance
door so we can now let ourselves come and go at will. We needn’t seek
the
doorman’s permission anymore. Passive resistance.

Reda and I later went down and informed the building manager that our
wedding
has been delayed and that I would now be staying here while Reda would
be
moving in after the wedding. He shrugged even though the unit is
exclusively in
Reda’s name (a higher level of police check would have been required of
the
flat’s owner had a foreigner’s name also been on the lease).

So Reda and her chaperones will be regulars at about 4:10 pm after she
gets off
work and I will be getting home from work at the hotel about 20 minutes
later
on days when I have gone downtown.

I’ve told everybody I’m out of money and they (Reda, her sister, Assim,
his
brother) now have to deal with paying for everything. Reda and her
nephew/chaperone
left tonight after we talked for about seven hours, making budgets,
etc., and
only had to telephone someone for translation help about ten times.
It’s all
getting easier.

28 April 2009 – ring the bells?

Reda now wants to go
the imam on Thursday for our interview
for the marriage contract and then go back to him and get married the
following
Thursday. Civil registration will come in about a month after my
divorce decree
copy arrives from Australia.

Reda and I were alone
in the flat for about three minutes
when Mahmoud headed downstairs as he knew that Mohamed Adel was on his
way up.
I mock cornered Reda in the hallway and made as if to kiss her lips.
She burst
into a great smile but said there would be none of that before the
wedding
party.

We filled nine of our 14 lounge room seats tonight. Very gay with
dinner at the
dining room table in the back room where the entrance to its balcony
keeps
fresh air sailing through the room. Assim and his brother Mohamed Adel
and son Mohamed
Assim officially thanked me on behalf of their family for renting and
furnishing
such a nice place for Reda. Reda, her sister Zuba and Mahmoud the
nephew were
there. An imam I know. Another man I don’t know well, a driver from the
hotel,
perhaps, and myself.

Assim announced tonight that he is going to get us drapes. Which is a
pretty
big deal in terms of home furnishing in Egypt. And a substantial
expense to
Assim. People just love them and sometimes seem to put them on walls
with no
windows just to have more of them. Or to cover bare walls. There is
often a
portrait of the male and female heads of households’ fathers or the
male head
of household himself. But otherwise, lounge rooms and dining rooms
often have
completely bare walls except for the drapes.

Always best to make a girl laugh. I did pretty well tonight. They
changed my
mixing of the settee pieces so the one set now runs along two
contiguous walls
and faces the other on the opposite contiguous walls. Reda and I were
sitting
in adjacent pieces of the expensive stuff and had just finished a
grueling look
at our budget/cash flow. We did it ourselves. Her with her bits of
English, me
with my bits of Arabic. Numbers, days of the week, names of the months.
Whew.
We were catching our breath and had both gone briefly numb in the brain
so I
said three words in really perfect Arabic – “After six months...” and
then
swept my arm towards the less expensive solon set. She just exploded.
Her own
mind had finished the sentence – “... this will all be ours.” She
laughed and
she laughed and she laughed.

Then we made a list of things my old neighbor’s eldest son and I will
do
tomorrow. And now, too, Reda’s nephew Mahmoud, it would seem. She gave
me LE100
earlier in the evening and tomorrow I will spend LE80 on hinges, door
latches
and shower heads (and LE20 on cigarettes for me and the young men). She
and
Zuba finished off stuffing the fridge with cheeses, milk, bread and
other handy
stuff and left for the night, faked kissing of the cheeks (we miss by
about two
inches), a light shake of the hand and “Bon nuit”.

I’m starting to live like some Arab business and laboring men like to
live right
now: sleeping until about noon and then working around the house about
noon to
8 pm with the other men and then socializing until about two in the
morning,
going to bed at four. That will change after Reda and I begin
cohabiting. I
prefer sleeping 10 pm to 6 am and she has to because of her job. But
Egyptian
men, if they can, seem to sleep from 4 am to noon. One has “arrived” as
an
adult male if one can do so, or something.

09 May 2009 – we didn’t get married (again)

We were supposed to
pick up Reda’s ID photos today and take
them to the imam but there were tradesmen at Reda and Zuba’s house all
through
the afternoon and evening so the photos didn’t get picked up until
about 8 pm –
too late to go to the imam. There was the distraction of the tradesmen
but
there were relatives to direct them and keep the house secure so I’m
wondering
if Reda’s getting stage fright and put off the photos, relieved to have
an
excuse.

So I went and got them. They were terrific – her passport photos and a
quick
portrait they did of the two of us. They used a really bright flash
which
totally bleached out all my wrinkles’ shadows. And then there was heavy
touch-up work. They even air brushed my shoes which were very, very
dusty from
the long walk to the photographers. It’s too big to scan the whole
thing.

When I got back from the photo shop Reda was very nervous – at the loss
of the
delaying tactic, perhaps. I hadn’t said anything – not much,
anyway. I
think it was more from her family’s side that she felt boxed in and
then announced,
“Thursday, the imam and the wedding party. Finished.
It will be Thursday. Finished.” “Finished”
also translates as “It’s complete. It’s agreed. It’s decided. We don’t
need to
talk about it anymore.” The imam and the party – that means she will be
moving
in Thursday night. Unless she weasels out of it again. The party
details are
vague. Their house’s street is a traditional possibility but they were
also on
the phone pricing clubs’ and hotel function rooms (and also telephoning
their
relatives in Upper Egypt to say it’s on for Thursday… so perhaps this
is it).

11 May 2009 – cheerful, kind and loving

We will, Inshallah,
do our marriage contract with an imam
Thursday which means we will get our flat lease papers released and
Reda can
start moving in. The wedding party is being delayed as it really takes
a week
or two to negotiate a venue, put out the invitations, etc.

“My” family has just been wonderful – the family which owns and
occupies most
of the flats in the building where my own little flat is. They
dismantled and
hauled all my furniture down to the street then loaded the truck when I
shifted
to the new place, the women packed up the kitchen, bedroom and office.
It all
happened in the blink of an eye. Boy Wonder (Ahmed), their middle son
who got
free use of my flat as a wedding present while I was back in Australia,
continues to advance at the InterContinental reservations office after
a useful
apprentice year at Assim’s hotel 2006-2007. Ahmed’s elder brother,
Semah, who
is cheerful, kind and loving but entirely devoid of ambition, now
occupies my
little flat.

Semah’s work at our new house has also been useful in the resulting
contact
with Reda and her family – Assim’s older brother Mohamed and Reda’s
nephew
Mahmoud yesterday, for example (Semah was working on electrical
fixtures and Mohamed
and Mahmoud were installing curtain rods). So Reda’s family is
understanding a
little more that Semah and Ahmed are like nephews to me.

There is a system now where I tell Assim what Reda is saying she wants,
Assim
tells me what is a better idea, Assim tells Mohamed and then Mohamed
gently
mentions useful things to Reda. Yesterday, for instance, Mohamed
mentioned to
Reda that Thursday is too soon for the wedding party she had envisaged
as a
budget had to be developed and then invitations have to be circulated
at least
a week in advance. Now Assim will engage her in a little talk about the
benefits of appliances compared to the some of the more expensive
wedding party
options. Everybody’s loving it. I’m the harried groom and glad for the
intellectual escape into Kove dictionary work that I’m doing for the
retired
New Zealand anthropologist, hamdullah.

“After the marriage, it’s the wife who causes all the trouble. Before
the
marriage it’s the man.” Several people have said that philosophically
in
exactly the same tones in recent weeks. It means that I live with heaps
of
anxiety for the moment. And everyone’s glad to watch me suffer. It’s
traditional.

13 May 2009 – turning the page

Reda and I will be married by the
imam Thursday but the
wedding party is now going to be on Saturday night. So, I guess it’s
Saturday
that will finally see Reda and myself chasing each other around the
bedroom in
the wee hours. “Eng” Reda. Electrical Engineer, Reda. Overeducated at
an early
time. Finally found her bloke.

I continue to be a bit brain dead and turn to the Kove dictionary work
for a
few hours every day as an escape.

Families have different ways of doing things, which, of course, each
thinks is
best. On the wedding party issue, there turns out to be a cultural
debate, in
Pyramids, anyway, as to the virtue of street weddings compared to
venues
involving clubs, hotels and other such options. A street wedding, you
see, is
the public announcement that society requires, etc. So everybody had me
focused
on this cultural debate for some days, my mind filled with lofty and
confusing
thoughts, when what actually turns out to matter are family histories –
and
Assim and Reda’s families have always had their wedding parties at
clubs. So
now events have conspired such that ours will be, too. This stuff is
wearing me
out.

The El Gabrys are a fabled family in Pyramids. 20,000 of them in our
suburb
alone. I think they owned much of the present Pyramids (suburb) area
outright
before Abdel Nasser’s reforms. They were the prototypical Pyramids tour
guides
when you had to ride out from Cairo on a camel. They migrated out of
Arabia
into Sinai and then to Pyramids generations ago, moving east to west
rather
than west to east like Moses. I have regular occasion to share a cuppa
with one
of their young professionals who’s enraptured by the Reda saga. “You
play the
part well,” he said at one point, nonplussed. “It’s like a Naguib
Mahfouz
novel. Mabruuk (‘congratulations’).” I was quite chuffed to hear that
from an
El Gabry.

15 May 2009 – married yesterday

I got married last
night to “Eng Reda” – Reda Mohamed
Mahmoud Hassan El Masry. The first day of three that will see us
actually move
in together.

Reda did a two year electrical engineering technology certificate from
1969,
all that was available to most women at the time, and rose to “Eng”
(“engineer”),
a title like “Dr”, “Prof” and few others so perhaps she did additional
courses
later. Anyway, that’s what her compańeros at the phone company, her
employer of
38 years or so sometimes call her as does her family.

Reda wanted an announcement/invitation in English and wanted “Dr Gafar
and Eng
Reda” at the top. So it was. With a map to the club for the main
wedding party
tomorrow night meant to amuse my east-side friends.

The club location is
to the far right on the invitation,
streets from the west given in some detail. So the venue is central
Pyramids
and the map drawn mainly for people coming from “deeper” into this
fearful
district. Fearful now-a-days mainly in the sense of trying to get into
or out
of the area on Pyramids Street – the clogged main artery through our
community
that runs from the Nile straight out to the pyramids.

There are some millions and millions
of people in this
district. We really never see any police in our particular
neighborhoods within.
There is rarely any need for them. The murder rate in this part of town
must be
about zero. Overall, one has to look to such places as Tokyo and
Stockholm to
find murder rates lower than greater Cairo.[1]

Fathers are raising
their sons and taking them to church or
mosque and teaching them right from wrong. If one hears, “Stop thief!”
you can
be sure that it all plays out in very exactly the same fashion as in Oliver
Twist. The witnesses rally a crowd that starts chasing him and
further
crowds close in on him from the sides and to his front and the crowds
usually
get their man, hauling him off as one to the nearest police station.
I’ve only
seen this once in two years and soon stopped telling the story… the
Egyptians
are embarrassed a bit to know that I’ve seen such a thing but more
incredulous
that I mention it, as if: “What else would you expect?”

I drove around the last couple days giving out invitations. My favorite
qahua (traditional cafe) is owned by an
Upper Egypt man. His younger brother runs the day shift and has been my
good
friend since I first moved to the neighborhood four years ago. They
have been
spellbound that I am marrying a woman from Upper Egypt. Perhaps they
had
imagined: young, bare-foot and soon-to-be pregnant because when they
saw “Eng”
Reda they just exploded. There aren’t many “Eng” women of that age, I
suppose.
Not surprising that one of them is Assim’s cousin. Her female cousins
on that
side of the family… Assim’s sisters… are doctors and such, medical
training and
qualifications being available, as a practical matter, to women before
a lot of
other things.

Assim negotiated the marriage contract through recent days and helped
me
present our desires to the imam who came to Reda’s mosque for us
yesterday
evening. “Reda’s mosque” – she owns it. It’s the ground floor of their
now six
storied apartment building where she, her sister and nephew live on the
fifth
floor and from which they collect tiny rents on the four floors/flats
below. A
seventh story addition continues their 20 year project or whatever it
has been,
apparently seeing work on it as funds become available from the rent on
the
others.

I guess we started the contract work at about 5 or 6 pm and it went on
through
the sunset prayer and then the final prayer of the day, the men of the
neighborhood
staying on in the mosque as they saw what was going on (because when
all is
complete the bride’s father and the groom then read aloud the portions
of the
contract which apply to them over the mosque’s PA system which is as
loud on
the street as for calls to prayer). So after we had read it over the PA
system,
we signed (Reda’s eldest male relative available, Mohamed Adel,
standing in for
her deceased father) and thumb-printed the contract copies. Then the
copies
were sent out to Reda in the street where there were special lights and
chairs
for the occasion, the women of the neighborhood gathering as they heard
the
contract being read over the mosque’s PA. The contract copies then came
back
inside with Reda’s signature and thumb-print and that was it. We’re
married.

Then I got to shake hands with all the men in the mosque and music
started
blasting from the DJ’s’ PA system in the street (from the wedding
services
company that brought and set up the chairs and lights outside). Then
the women
of the neighborhood and Reda’s female relatives danced and sang and
laughed for
about two hours, the only men there being Reda’s immediate male
relatives (Mohamed
Adel, Assim, Reda’s nephew Mahmoud, and Assim’s son Mohamed Assim), me
and my
carpenter who is a good friend of Assim’s. I had misunderstood these
small
street functions and thought they were humble street weddings. But as I
reflected on it last night, there is a different cast of characters at
these
small contract functions, there is not always a stage for the bride and
groom or
a belly dancer, there is a PA system and never live music. In our
neighborhoods,
there are fewer men attending and the function is over relatively
quickly.
Reda, the devout mosque owner, by the way, insisted on a belly dancer
for
tomorrow night and had a particular one in mind.

We will be about 250 tomorrow night or perhaps it is the night after. I
now
repair to my old flat where “my” family has been feeding me as I stop
by and we
make plans. It’s a short hop from my old neighborhood to the wedding
party
venue so one hired car will ferry us all, four at a time, from about 7
pm,
tomorrow night. Today, after touching base with the Selims (“my”
family’s
surname) I’ll be at Reda’s to spend the rest of the day with her Upper
Egypt
relatives here for the occasion and other such friends and relatives as
stop
by.

16 May 2009 – our house

Our “house,” into which Reda will move after the wedding party, is
pretty well fixed up. So I’m off to meet my fate.

This has been an awful lot of fun.

Mahmoud the
magnificent, the nephew Reda helped raise, will
be here with a car in a few minutes to get me and then we pick up Reda
at the
beauty parlor (where the brides traditionally go in their full wedding
gowns,
have things done to them then get picked up by their beaus and are
driven together
to the wedding party).

21 May 2009 – safe delivery

Reda was just rapt
when a box from my sister arrived with
the bosta to Assim’s hotel a couple days ago just as the
wedding
festivities were dying down. Assim took it home to Faisal and I picked
it up
from there last night. Reda was able to read out loud the words on the
cover of
a CD in the package, expressing her frustration that she didn’t know
what most
of them meant. She was an hour or more with all the stuff on the dining
room
table, looking at it again and again. Curtain lining fabric. Various
things
were in there.

People left us to
ourselves for a couple days after the wedding party but then
started stopping by in small groups in what now seems a period of
formal
visits. They’re all following the same script – dressed to the nines
and
hauling in piles of boxes from the best pastry and smorgasbord shops.
We haven’t
cooked since we got married. Her relatives had left baked chickens,
pigeons and
quail with the doorman for us after I had left to pick her up for the
wedding
party Saturday.

I was out
of the house for a couple hours Monday. Reda hasn’t,
I think, left the flat at all.

I suddenly had a
honeymoon to pay for the morning after the
wedding party. I asked Reda when she would be going back to work,
thinking it
would be a day or two so she could save her vacation days for things
further
down the line. She looked at me rather blankly – “June 1st,” she said,
“10 days
marriage leave.” She just assumed I would know. So I got in touch with
Australia about finishing my May dictionary work for the NZ
anthropologist by
the 25th and getting paid the 26th. They said, “No worries,” so there
was then a
budget to go somewhere for five days before Reda returns to work. We
will be
going to Dahab, a resort town on the Gulf of Aqaba. These places are
only about
6 hours and $20 away on nice air-conditioned passenger vans and buses.

31 May 2009 – home again, home again

We got home about 24
hours ago, slept a reasonable good
night’s sleep and then both went off to work this morning. The Dahab,
Gulf of
Aqaba honeymoon was very relaxing. We had the perfect budget for the
honeymoon
and there wasn’t a single serious thing to do there. The van that
brought us
back stopped around Suez for an hour to let the rush hour cool down a
bit in
Cairo before driving us into town and Assim’s hotel. The traffic was
indeed
light all the way to the hotel but I had a wave of vertigo as we worked
our way
through the single traffic backup we encountered. I clutched up at the
thought
of all my new responsibilities but recovered before we got to Assim’s
hotel.

Looking back on it, we are a couple of 60-ish professionals and her
family wasn’t
going to cough up much for the wedding beyond what we could do for
ourselves.
But neither of us had been saving for a wedding. That was too
theoretical
before actually finding a mate. So things got done for what we could
afford at
the time.

Two copies of my Australian divorce decree arrived in separate mailings
while
we were gone. So now we can go to the Australian consulate and provide
them with
the central document they want for their “Certification of No
Objection” to the
Egyptian Justice Ministry which registers all marriage contracts
involving a
foreigner.

We wandered off to
Dahab with our marriage contracts from
the imam. But we didn’t have them stamped by the Justice Ministry and
couldn’t
until the divorce decree came from Australia, etc. Without the stamp,
the hotel
reception desk in Dahab had to call in the police and disclose they
were
allowing, with police permission, a room to this couple with an
unstamped
marriage contract. The policeman didn’t know quite what to make of it
and
called in someone else. I had brought along my house purchase contract cum
title, Egyptian driver’s license, previous Australian passport with
Egyptian
stamps from three and four years ago and all other bona fidé. I
guess my birth certificate was still in Cairo but telling an Egyptian
that one
is also American is not always the first thing I want to do. Anyway, it
didn’t
take really, really long before the second man came, Assim (who they
all know,
including the second policeman) called, the policeman endorsed the
hotel’s
acceptance of our unstamped marriage contract and that was that.

This is what Egyptians do, I’m told.
If travelling with one’s
spouse, they travel with their (stamped) marriage contracts because the
hotels
are required by law to demand them and scrutinize them, a law that
doesn’t
apply if both members of a couple checking in are foreigners. It is
said to always
be the contract itself that is required. Egyptian women don’t take
their
husband’s surname so it isn’t obvious from driver’s licenses and other
identity
documents that a couple is (probably) married.

Home again, home again, now… Reda returns to a work routine defined by
decades
of invariance – 8 am to 4 pm. I took off for the hotel at 7 am and
worked until
about 2 pm and have to go back tonight to work with the night manager
on the
reservations documentation system. Then after a few days or weeks of
orientation to the system, I will do the daily reservations work here
at home
in the morning over the Internet, then do dictionary and what other
contract
work I might find through midday and reservations again in the evening.
It will
be off season now through the summer. A good time to ease into the
reservations
work before they start picking up for September and beyond.

Reda glowed throughout the honeymoon and has been very cheerful today.
She just
left for her sister’s place and I am now leaving for my old
neighborhood where
I will spend a couple hours before going downtown to the hotel to work
into the
wee hours on learning the reservations procedures.

I saw a friend from Tersa Street in the row ahead
of me
after noon prayers were over in our big mosque at the top of the hill
here one
Friday in June. Here in “Masaakin Dobat, Remaya”… I’ve finally learned
the name
of where it is that we live. My friend, more of an acquaintance, is a
PhD mechanical
engineer and bearded “Sunna” (Salafi). The last time I had seen him was
weeks
or months ago when I drove or perhaps walked past him near his
relative’s place
which is right on Tersa a couple blocks from the cross-street that
leads to the
flat that I own. That day I last saw him I was hurrying off to meet up
with
some people, Reda’s family, perhaps, and only had time to tell him I
was
looking for a wife. “Who?” he said, spinning his right hand excitedly
from the
axis of his wrist. Another acquaintance stood looking over Dr Eng
Wael’s
shoulder where Wael had turned away from him to greet me. “Looking”, I
said,
holding a flat hand above my eyebrows as if looking for something from
a
distance. The two looked at each other, eyes wide as they saw that I
was
serious and I smiled and nodded “Yes”, and hurried off to my
destination.

He was in the Dobat Remaya mosque that June
Friday, having brought
his wife to visit her mother and sisters. Upon my noticing and greeting
him in
the mosque he was a man with a mission… to find out where I lived and
who I
married. He was bustling us along to his car, he explained, so we could
drive
to my place. I wasn’t making any progress explaining to him that we
were almost
there as we neared his mother-in-law’s parking lot. “There”, he said,
pointing
to where his car was. “There”, I said, pointing to the fifth floor of
my
building next door.

He followed me up the stairs and stood two steps
short of
the top, hand on the handrail, a common Egyptian courtesy when arriving
unexpected at a residence. I unlocked our entrance door and called
inside, “Eng
Reda! Eng Wael heyna (Eng Wael is here)!” Wael was frozen at the top
stairs and
I called out to him, “Faddal (please [come along])!” and disappeared
into the
house. He entered nervously as I barked a few of Wael’s details to Reda
way
back in our bedroom. I got him seated and Reda appeared after going for
her
head scarf. They shook hands and she disappeared into the kitchen.
“Tea, please?”
I called to her in the kitchen and immediately regretted having done
so. It’s a
bit rude and their actual word for “please” is never heard. So I called
to her
right away after, “Tea, perhaps?” and she called back cheerfully, “Yes,
perhaps.”

Wael seemed stunned and hardly spoke the whole
time except
when he and Reda were speaking Arabic rapidly and earnestly for some
minutes.
He was in a bit of a hurry to leave after a cup of tea as I imagine he
had
family obligations. But he really did seem stunned to find me in such a
nice bright
place with such nice new furniture and such a nice Upper Egypt wife.
He, with
his beard and constant galabea,[1]
thinks I’m a theocratic recalcitrant and I’ve long done what I could to
encourage
him to believe it was true. A sort of a hobby of mine.

A long note, as it turns out. They’ve just called the sunrise prayer.
Copyediting work is starting to come in. There are holiday reservations
at the
hotel to deal with. And we’re moving house before the end of the month,
I’ve
just been told.

We got in for the night at straight up midnight.

I was puttering around our old neighborhoods through the evening while
Reda and
her sister commiserated on the 20-year-old nephew’s persistent demand
and his
reaction to being told he isn’t getting it: a big new $40,000 2010 car
(with
which he would surely kill someone). He gave up on the $6,000
motorcycle (with
which he would surely have killed himself)... but only after many, many
weeks.
And now this.

It’s the first time they’ve ever said “No” to him and he isn’t giving
up
easily... raging around the house, etc.

I just stay out of it.

Reda had taken the day off again today as her sister, Zuba, is 63, a
bit frail
and just kind of elderly with cataract surgery she needs but seems
frightened
to pursue and not holding up very well under her son Mahmoud’s constant
pressure. But no emergency calls came through during the day and we
were home
until 7 pm when the call finally came and Reda stated flatly that she
was going
over to the house she shared with them for 18 years (a 150 sq meter
flat).

I didn’t want to ask her to take a taxi but I didn’t want take her over
there
myself, either, so I called Assim, their patient
protector/cousin/next-best-thing-to-brother
who helps them out, to see if it was worth it. I mentioned that Reda
was saying
there was an imam there for some reason and Assim then said it would be
good to
get over there as both he and the imam had been there the night before,
the
imam reading useful passages from the Quran to Mahmoud.

So off we went in the late rush-hour traffic, getting there in about
half an
hour rather than the 15 minutes it usually takes after 8 pm. The imam
was gone
and Mahmoud had locked himself in his room. I figured the two sisters
would
then want to talk for a few hours and went off by myself to visit
friends. Only
since this motorcycle and car business came up, except immediately
after we
were married, have they been having long, long talks on the phone...
occasionally tearful before, during or after this time ‘round. Mahmoud
didn’t come
home one night recently, the first time he had ever done that, and Reda
was
just wailing though Mahmoud is 20 years old.

I first went to see my carpenter, Ashraf. I gave him $800 eight months
ago to
build a desk and book cases for my home office. He had built my kitchen
cabinets
and cupboards when I was in my own little flat, delivering about a year
ago...
some three months after the down payment (the kitchen pieces are now
here in
our present flat – Egyptians move their kitchen counters and cabinets
from
house to house like the Swedes).

He wasn’t in tonight but Assim’s older brother was – Mohamed who signed
over
responsibility for Reda to me at the mosque when we signed our marriage
contract.

Mohamed is also a carpenter and does some work with Ashraf from time to
time.
Assim related to me eight months ago that I was lucky to get the
original
kitchen stuff finished and delivered so quickly, telling me several
stories of
how long it took Ashraf to get certain projects done. He said, “Since
it’s paid
in full, it will probably be a long time before he starts and much,
much longer
before he finishes. You should have taken me with you when you placed
the
order. You should never pay Ashraf in full when placing an order.” He
wasn’t
wrong but there’s a longer story about why it had been paid in full
that I
might tell another day.

Ashraf is a gifted craftsman and kind of a puppy dog (we can say in
English,
but not Arabic)... he just wants to be loved and people put up with his
faults
because they specifically want things made by him. Especially Assim and
certain
of Assim’s close friends around Faisal. I’m beginning to learn that
these men,
including Ashraf, who have so welcomed me into their company for four
years and
more, are school days friends of Assim. I knew, vaguely, that Assim’s
father married
Reda’s mother’s sister, in the late 1930s, approximately, and raised
his family
on the Red Sea coast where he did well in construction. Some of the
projects of
the time, that are major visitor destinations today, were just getting
started
and he did well, indeed. I knew a bit of that and that his children
were all
educated to the highest degree they desired (the eldest son an MBA or
something [his son is director of Radio Shack logistics in Egypt], the
eldest[?] daughter
a physician, Assim, trained in commercial painting contracting… other
stories
that escape me for the moment). But I only recently came to understand
that
their father maintained two households from the time the children came
of
school age: one or, over time, different family homes on the Red Sea
and one in
Cairo where the children were with their mother during the school year.
And
Assim’s friendship with Ashraf and these other men, with all Ashraf’s
gifts and
faults, go back to the 1950s.

Assim’s advice has been to stop by Ashraf’s shop
occasionally
and then every day if possible once he had actually started work on my
office
furniture... which was about 3 months ago. I stop by and kind of admire
how it
is coming along and try to keep the ball rolling.

But tonight my stuff was buried under a large order involving an entire
kitchen, as it has been for about a month. I talked to Mohamed for half
an hour
and then headed off for Tarek’s music studio.

Tarek is a 50 year old composer, arranger and conductor who has won the
“Middle
East Arranger of the Year Award” 15 of the last 25 years. The most
famous
composer/arranger in the Arab world through many of those years but a
private,
humble and exuberantly happy guy, content to live in an enormous flat
on Tersa
Street some few hundreds of meters from my little flat over there, so
as to be close
to where an important recording studio was built some decades ago
between
Faisal and Pyramids Streets. Actually, he has three flats. One for
himself and
his present wife. Another in an adjacent suburb for his mother. And one
above
his own for his ex-wife and their grown, but not yet married children
from his
first marriage.

He was the man from Assim’s mosque that Assim brought along to the imam
when I
went to declare my faith a few days after getting back from Australia
in 2008
(which was just a couple days short of a year before I met Reda).

Tarek has a number of rather high level religious training certificates
and
speaks a wider English-of-religion than Assim. Assim knew for some
months of my
intention to go to mosque upon returning 16 April 2008 and he had
arranged that
Tarek come along that night to translate for the imam and myself so the
imam
would not fear there were any misunderstandings. Assim and Tarek are
old
friends and Tarek and I immediately became friends as well.

Tarek was sitting at his really, really big, really, really souped-up
Macintosh
computer when I arrived, composing the orchestral accompaniment to a
revered Yemini-Saudi
singer/songwriter’s latest creation. He’s like an Egyptian falafel
sandwich-maker
at the computer – hands flying at about 90 miles an hour – right at the
limit
for hours on end. I can’t imagine how he escapes tendonitis. He works
sort of 2
pm to midnight at his studio and unless he’s out of town it’s a fairly
sure bet
he’ll be there between those hours except for Fridays and occasionally
Saturdays.

When I got married, Tarek said, “I’ll give you LE6000 for your
assurance.” “Assurance”
is what they call the money foreigners must pay each year to the
government to
engage in commerce or be employed in Egypt. It wasn’t of moment at the
time of
the wedding as I was doing the New Zealand anthropologist’s Papua-New
Guinea
dictionary work. We can do work from abroad on a tourist visa, which is
what I
had until last month, so long as we pay the normal income tax.

So as the dictionary work was coming to an end and I began to look for
other
things, the LE6000 was in the air and Tarek mentioned it the other day.
I
thought I was getting a working visa last month but they only gave me a
residency
visa without the right to work. The residency visa is tied to marriage.
A
working visa is tied to the 6000 which is paid by an employer or by
oneself if
self-employed. I hadn’t realized there was a difference and only then
began to
understand this “assurance” stuff Tarek and Assim had mentioned at the
time of
the wedding. Assim gives me LE6000 a year for his hotel’s very, very
part-time
internet reservations work so he wasn’t the place to go looking for the
6000
which would then be good for any other work I did for other Egyptian
clients or
employers. This would later turn out to involve certain misperceptions
but it’s
what we all understood of the situation on this particular night.

I had become uncomfortable with taking the LE6000 money off Tarek. So I
went to
see him.

“I wanted to tell you I can’t take the 6000,” I said, without sitting
down.

“But I told you I’d give it to you,” he protested.

“But I should have said ‘No’,” I said.

“But it’s nothing,” he said. Which was a lie. His 35 year-old
sister is
finally getting married; ASAP as far as her family is concerned. Their
father
died 30 years ago and Tarek is her only hope for a fancy wedding, which
Tarek
very much wants to provide for her. And his oldest kids are all in
expensive
private schools and universities.

“It’s money,” I said. “Between us. And there’s never been money between
us. So
let’s not start now. We’ll buy a house in a couple years. Loan me
10,000 (LE)
for a year when we do that instead.”

He’s got two producers, one presently offering “11 million” and the
other more
if he’ll do a 5 CD symphonic album of his own melodic compositions.
He’ll have
10,000 LE left “in a couple years”, I reckon. And it will fit well with
what is
the local feeling of being adrift if not constantly owing some people
and being
owed by others.

Tarek broke out into a surprised smile, shook his head and I walked out
without
either of us saying more.

That trip only killed half an hour so I went to a coffee house near
Reda’s
sister’s house but the fun waiter I know works the day shift, I didn’t
see
anyone else I knew and after drinking a cup of tea so slowly it got
cold I
called Assim. He was home so I drove the 10 or 15 minutes to his house.

I asked his advice about Mahmoud which I had never done directly
before, saying
I kept my mouth shut because it’s better, down the road, if it was his
uncles
slapping him around when he went over the top rather than me.

So he is actually and truly mystified. And his mommies are El
Menya
girls who never had a fridge until Reda got the one I brought along…
the one
which young Ahmed Magdy gave me as one of his gifts in kind for the
year of
free rent. So then Zuba had to have one, too. They just never spent a
penny
except on Mahmoud which is the kind of living that allowed them to
build a six
storied apartment building, floor by floor, for cash over the years.
Reda, the
electrical engineer, and Zuba who taught for 15 or 20 years in high
paying jobs
in Saudi Arabia. Mahmoud was born there (her ex-husband is also
Egyptian) and
Zuba came back here with Mahmoud after saving up a lot of gold when it
was
still rather inexpensive..

“So that is what this is truly all about?” I asked. “It’s the first
time in his
life he’s been told, ‘No.’ ‘No,’ is what they really mean. And we’re
all just
going to have to tough it out?”

“Yes,” he replied, not de-energized in the least. He has a difficult
stepson who
is perhaps 23, but finally maturing, and he then told the story of the
latest
episode with him. He’s like that around the hotel, as well. I’ve never
seen him
make a mistake when dealing with people, young or old.

“Assim,” I said. “Before marrying Reda and working for you I worked
alone for
25 years and lived alone for 12 years. I didn’t even know what patience
was,
anymore. I’m not sure I had any in the first place. I learn a lot from
you.”

Then I left and went back to Ashraf’s.

Ashraf was still gone and so was Mohamed, cabinetry in various stages
of
completion spread out onto both sides of the street which isn’t 5 yards
wide,
the roll-down door of the shop half open (people don’t nick stuff in
these neighborhoods
until after about 3 or 4 am). I decided to call Ashraf on my mobile
before I
gave up and then Reda. Ashraf reported that he was 1/2 hour away
(easily not
true and easily stretched to longer if he meant to avoid me). Reda
asked for
more time with Zuba but it was getting on towards 10 and I thought I
better go
over there and get things moving.

I got Reda to take off with me straight away but as we motorcycled out
of the neighborhood
she asked me to turn left back into the neighborhood rather than right
towards
the main boulevards to our home. She wanted to see someone for “10
minutes”.
They were delightful. A woman and her 20 something daughter. Of course
they all
talked for an hour or two.

We got home right at midnight, as I guess I already mentioned.

Thinking back to what the working day was like today, nothing came to
mind when
I sat down to the computer after getting home tonight. Reda took the
day off
waiting for Zuba to call about Mahmoud. I worked the Sara Inn internet
reservations through the morning for 3 or 4 hours as the holidays and
high
season are now upon us.

But now I remember we were house hunting in the afternoon.

Our one year lease, as I only recently learned (and this is standard),
can be
terminated by either party with one or two months’ notice. Which is
just as
well for the renter... one’s plans can change, one’s income may
disappear, one’s
neighbors might turn out to be unbearable, etc., etc. And now the
landlord has
suddenly said he wants to end the lease. As of 31 December.

His son is getting married a few months earlier than he expected when
he signed
the one-year lease (he had firmly told Reda “only one year” but I only
became
aware of that two or three months ago). The son will take the place (as
the
landlord and other people like him envisaged when buying such second or
third
or fourth houses 10 and 20 years before they are needed by their sons
or
daughters). “Good on ‘em.”

The ideal Egyptian father. To buy a place for each of their children,
sons more
often than daughters, perhaps, before or upon their marriage. Which is
achievable for even rather poor people. The rather larger place Reda
and I will
begin looking for when she mandatorily retires 15 April, 2011 (yes...
we first
met at Assim’s house on her birthday) won’t cost us $30,000 or $40,000.
The
bachelor boys’ starter flats (45-65 sq meters) through a vast area of
Pyramids
aren’t $10,000 and some millions of families in richer and poorer
Cairo, I
would guess, began married life with a paid-for starter house.

So it seems we’ll be putting our furniture back together on New Year’s
Eve and
trying to find all our favorite stuff in the moving boxes.

Probably in this same “city of the armed forces” development. Many
people are doing
the same thing we are... getting a lot of floor space (“165 sq meters”
[~ 1650
square feet] calculated by portion of building’s slab... about 135,
actual) for
$140 a month when they’re renting... ours has been just ~$100 due to
the short
lease or something.

I want to stay in this same building and Reda says, “We’ll see,” after
viewing
the one flat that may be available. The neighbors are wonderful... have
made us
feel welcomed... they always give a pleasant nod and the standard
verbal
greetings but are scrupulously private. There’s a well-lit place to
chain up
the motorcycle at night. It’s maybe 6-800 meters from Reda’s office.
But there
is only one empty unit in this building that may be available to let
and the
kitchen and bathroom have been gutted but not put back together yet. I
think it’s
been arranged that we look at it tomorrow evening. We only understand
each
other clearly about half the time but that hasn’t been a huge problem.
We’re
both glad to have found each other, there’s a lot of trust and joy, and
we’re
still just kind of laughing most of the time. I’ll get half the story
and then forget
half of that and suddenly it’s time to go someplace and I just cast my
fate to
the wind and we drive off to where she wants to go and I start putting
the
pieces together once we get there.

She is a product of Gamal Abdel Nasser’s early women’s education
initiatives.
An electrical engineering associate or some kind of two year degree.
Whatever
it was that had become available to women at the time. Abdel Nasser
came to their
school and shook their hands when she was 13, encouraging them,
especially the
girls, to get higher education. So when I kiss her hand….

I write for Mahmoud. His mother was about 43 when
he was
born and Reda about 38 and then Zuba and Reda raised him together from
the time
of his parent’s divorce when he was 2. We will all be gone sooner than
he might
like (although he might not feel that way tonight), and my Reda diary
will be
one of the things I leave him.

-------------------------------------
Addendum 1 – week later

I didn’t quite understand why Reda and Zuba were suddenly looking so
bright
when I showed up to collect Reda from Zuba’s on the evening described
above...
I was glad for it at the time as it left me feeling rather upbeat and
in the
mood to send a holiday note off into the ether. But when I went to the
hotel
after I woke up from sleeping through the morning Assim told me that
Zuba and
Reda had, that previous night, told Mahmoud that they would buy him the
car...
but would have to sell an apartment or empty lot first and that it
would take a
couple months... which they, of course, aren’t going to do. There is,
in fact,
no plan to buy him a car at all. But this will give Mahmoud time to
reflect on
the wisdom of selling off his inheritance to fund the whims of the
moment and
provides an indefinite delaying tactic to Zuba and Reda... inventing
stories of
deals that fell through etc. month after month. Anyway, we were over
there
again some days after the evening mentioned above… Mahmoud cheerful and
content
that they had given in to him... Zuba and Reda glowing in the relief of
finding
a sustainable delaying tactic.

Today’s notes concern a strapping young steer who
had an
unfortunate experience. He got eaten.

My neighbor’s middle son at the flat I own, Ahmed Magdy Selim, is kind
of a
self-made man who I have mentioned before and there are perhaps some
hundreds
of thousands like him in Pyramids. This young bloke went to government
schools
and then did accounting at Cairo University, working part time as a
house
painter, and has just now, at the age of about 26 or 27, been promoted
to chief
or other upper level supervisor of reservation personnel or something
like that
after only three years at the Intercontinental Semiramis mega hotel on
the Nile
downtown. He, at least, seems on his way to being a little bit rich.

When he finished a Berlitz intensive business English course after his
accounting
BA and military service four years ago, I took him on a bit of a hike
to meet
Assim. We found him at the used furniture store he, at the time, owned
and
operated evenings close to his home in Faisal. Assim talked to Ahmed
quietly
and a bit privately and the few words spoken that I understood
suggested that
Assim was asking about Ahmed’s education. After some further lounging
in front
of a cup of tea at the furniture store, Ahmed and I started out on the
long
walk back to Tersa/Omda (the nearest well-known cross-street on Tersa).

“He hired me,” Ahmed gasped as soon as we
were out of
earshot from the furniture store. “He hired me to help with the
bookkeeping and the evening shift.”

So that was that. I went back to Australia a few
short days
later and received nothing but reports of love and admiration in
Assim’s emails
about Ahmed and Ahmed’s emails about Assim for the two years I was back
in Australia.
And it was the two of them together who picked me up at the airport
almost
exactly two years later when I came back for good.

It’s fun to watch over time as I hang around and
do a little
work at the hotel... Assim’s kind of well-known for training and then
launching
young people on to bigger things. A great mentor, we would say in
English. A
bit of a sheikh to the young people who received their start in life
from him.

By the time I left to go back to Australia in 2006 I was content with
the flat
I had bought and content that I would work, live and die with my
friends in
those neighborhoods when I retired from full-time employment in
linguistics in
2008. I’d never really dropped my anchor before.

I decided by about 2007 back in Australia that I would also die praying
with
them and told Assim and Ahmed in phone calls that I wanted to go to
mosque and
declare my faith upon getting back to Egypt.

They wasted no time when I returned, April 2008, and the first day I
was first
looking well rested after returning they explained that Assim would
take me to
a particular sheikh/pastor and that another man would be there as well.

It was the sheikh from that first night at mosque, Sheikh Asfor
(“Sparrow”),
who came to my sister-in-law Zuba’s house two or three evenings ago...
two or
perhaps three days after she “sacrificed” a cow in honor of my marriage
to Reda
eight months ago.

I’ve been a great disappointment to Sheikh Asfor as I will mention
presently.

As Assim now tells the story, Zuba told Assim,
after he had
introduced Reda and myself to each other, “I’m gonna kill a cow if she
marries
this guy (“sacrifice” – no precise English equivalent of an Arabic word
that
seems to imply either “kill” or “sacrifice” [“sacrifice” animals as in
the Old
Testament – they actually then consumed the animals as Jewish and
Muslim people
do today]). I promise to God I will kill a cow.” Assim was glad to let
the
comment be forgotten for a time but he has recently begun to tell me
that story
saying that he has been recalling it more and more to Zuba… “You can’t
promise
to God to do that and then not do it…”

So the cow story started some days ago with a two or three km
motorcycle ride
from Reda’s sister’s house up to where the farms start in northwest
Pyramids/Faisal
directly west of Dokki (and then extend north and beyond 26 July
Corridor and then
into the Delta). Not far at all from Reda and Zuba’s building – there
are vast
agricultural lands that are still being cultivated. The city now
surrounds that huge
part of the Nile’s west bank farms, which is on the Nile flood plain.
The east
bank, Cairo proper, has a bit of elevation and was the earlier city in
its
entirety. As mentioned before, the west bank flood plain only became
available
for residential use after the Aswan Dam was finished and that area quit
flooding every spring.

At the southwestern edge of that remaining farm land, Reda paid for the
cow
under the date palms with money Zuba had given her and then we slowly
putt-putt-putted
back to Zuba’s place, one of the Upper Egypt kind of guys who sold us
the cow
walking along behind us in his galabea, leading the cow, followed by
another
motorcycle putt-putt-putting along with two butchers in galabea on it
bringing
up the rear. The “cow” was a two year old steer which looked very clean
and
healthy. They slaughtered it in their apartment building’s
entrance/foyer
because there was a drain on the floor for the blood.

When I got back some hours later, Reda and Zuba were finished with the
butchering which they had done in an apartment in their building they
are
renovating after the men slaughtered, skinned, gutted and quartered the
cow
downstairs and brought the pieces up to them. They had it all in a big
pile of black
plastic bags of perhaps 5-10 kilos next to a gleaming white pile of
bones.

Zuba gave me perhaps 10 kilos to take to “my” family (Ahmed Magdy’s
parents,
specifically). Reda and Zuba then distributed much of the rest around
Zuba’s neighborhood
over the next day or two, the biggest bags to the poorest families, and
Reda
and I brought armloads, perhaps 25 kilos, home for ourselves which went
into
the freezer with perhaps 3 kilos for our building’s doorman.

Sheikh Asfor came to Zuba’s place a few nights ago to do what imam’s do
when
someone sacrifices a cow. I went to his mosque many Fridays immediately
after
my conversion. But that soon came into competition with an equally
conservative
mosque very near my little flat where I was living (while Sheikh
Asfor’s mosque
was more like a 4 or 5 km hike through the streets of our
neighborhoods).

A mosque near my flat took an interest in me once they noticed I was
wandering
off for the noon prayers in galabea every Friday at about 11 am. I was
visited
at home by three men, one of them a locally famous sheikh who has spent
most of
the last 20 years in Los Angeles with a growing mega-mosque. Actually
someone
came up from Magdy’s flat who said there were some men at Magdy’s house
who
would like to talk to me – and I went down to see what it was all
about). Sheikh
Mahdy speaks an unaccented American English and told me in a friendly,
welcoming way that the men with him would help me get started in
reading the
Koran at a nearby mosque.

So it was Sheikh Mahdy at my brother Magdy’s
house. Surely I
will think of tongue twister with which to tell future versions of the
story.

Sheikh Mahdy’s invitation soon became rather more appealing than Sheikh
Asfor’s
mosque because that small mosque – very small mosque – which Sheikh
Mahdy
directed me to is very close to my house – very close – and doesn’t
pray Gomah
(“1. the Friday midday prayer; 2. Friday”). Like many of the small
mosques on
our streets over around Tersa/Omda, everybody goes to a certain large
mosque on
the main street, Tersa, for Gomah. There the “Dr.” imam speaks rather
softly
for about 20 or 30 minutes while Sheikh Asfor always speaks for an hour
and a
bit… in a great bellowing voice over a loud PA system... to a
good-sized
gathering I might add. Very popular with Upper Egypt migrants. Of
course I
never understood anything of what either one of them was saying in
their
sermons so I was glad for a shorter walk to a shorter talk. I wore
galabea to
the Tersa Street mosque for a while. But it didn’t seem to be the most
common
thing to do so I then usually didn’t unless I was just feeling kind of
happy
and wanted to go to mosque as Muslims did 1,000 years ago and more,
wearing
galabea and sandals, my eyeglasses and wristwatch left at home and
nothing in
my pockets but my house key and prayer beads.

By the end of a year and a month back in Egypt, almost precisely, I got
my first
flat with Reda in Dobat. Here I go to a large mosque on the other side
of the
school from our flat. People at that mosque are pleasantly oblivious to
me, as
they were at the big mosque on Tersa Street, except that one or two
people a
month may walk up when they notice me somewhere in the neighborhood,
and
introduce themselves, saying they’ve seen me at mosque, and welcoming
me since
I seem to be new. They don’t necessarily assume that I am a foreigner.
They just
occasionally and pleasantly welcome anyone new to a mosque. An Egyptian
might
be a white, white Europoid (although very, very few have anything but
jet black
hair unless they are Syrian) or a black, black African.

I had learned by the time we married and moved out here that neither
Sheikh
Asfor’s mosque nor the small mosque I was directed to in my old
neighborhood by
Sheikh Mahdy are highly regarded by the main of the larger community.
And...
surprise, surprise, surprise... certain members of the one small
“Sunna” mosque
even made disparaging comments about the other.

There is mild disdain towards those Upper Egypt
people who
cling to their rural ways on the part of older Pyramids families and
there is
the same resentment towards fundamentalists in general that so many of
us have
in America and Australia. Jesus will come back if we help Israel steal
more
land from the Palestinians (America and even a bit of that in
Australia). The
rich people who don’t want to pay for my ten kids’ education will burn
in hell
(Egypt). But it means something to Assim and Tarek to attend Sheikh
Asfor’s
mosque so we talk about Islam quite often and I don’t say anything
about Sheikh
Asfor’s presumed disappoint with me.

And of course the fundamentalists are delightful when you meet them
individually.

So there we sat the other night, Sheikh Asfor and
myself, at
opposite ends of my sister-in-law’s dining table on the day they
butchered the
steer, kind of lightly sparing with each other... a glance and a frown
on his
part, a glance and a smile on mine. The Keeper of the True Religion and
the
Comfortably Less Than Pious.

He had arrived with five other men on three motorcycles, the youngest
about 20,
the oldest about his age... 40 or so.

I had declined an offer, from the youngest, of a miswaak (sticks the
size of a
toothbrush, the blunt ends of which they use to ritually clean the
teeth). He
kept trying to give it to me after prayers at Reda’s mosque (the one
she and
her sister built into the first floor of their apartment house). I just
didn’t
want it and I especially didn’t want him to think I was interested in
all their
many overt acts of piety. Prayers were done, we were still kneeling
where we
had prayed and I refused it three times and then got up and moved to
another
part of the mosque when he poked it at me a fourth time. The
Palestinians are
not going to get their state etc. if I use miswaak. Which is,
essentially, what
fundamentalists of this type believe. Like Jerry Falwell, who came
flying out
the door September 11 and blamed the attacks on American homosexuals
and
others, Egyptians became more religiously conservative after the 1967
war
because they believe God would not have let Israel win if they, the
Egyptians,
had been living right. Women, for instance, started wearing head
scarves again…
and still do.

So afterwards we were sitting at the dinner table, Sheikh Asfor
“harumphff-ing”
slightly whenever our eyes met, the 40-ish guy with the biggest zabibah
(see Wikipedia)
glowering
at me again and again until my amused smiles made him give up, the
young bloke
a bit upset until he saw by my constant smiles that I wasn’t mad at
him.
Neither Asfor nor any of the others tried to converse with me as they
speak no
English that I know of and perhaps assumed that since I wasn’t taking
an
interest in the True Religion I also was not learning any Arabic. Or
maybe I’m
on their “to be shunned list”, though I don’t know. They’re generally
friendly
towards us in the neighborhoods when Reda and I are out and about.
Anyway, I
kept my peace and just kind of enjoyed the situation and did not, at
Sheikh
Asfor’s table, try to converse.

I don’t remember anything else of consequence from that night except
that after
the meal Asfor had each of the other five go into all the rooms of the
house
and then, as if at the mosques around the neighborhoods, sing out the
call to
prayer, the Adhan, loudly at slightly different starting moments. They
were all
experienced muezzin, their calls filled the house and it was really
quite
thunderous and pleasant to all of us to hear.

Assim, Reda’s nephew Mahmoud and I then walked the six of them down the
five flights
of stairs to the three meter wide street and they climbed onto their
three
motorcycles (in their galabeas). I had been saying “Shokrun” again and
again as
we went down the stairs and then poured out onto the street. Then as
they
started to pull away I called out good and loud, over the rather quiet
motorcycle noises, “Shokrun tani! Miraati mabsuuta awi!” (“Thank you
again! My
wife is very happy!”). They exploded in embarrassed laughter. I don’t
know why.
Perhaps they then assumed I had understood everything they had been
saying
through the evening.

So that’s the report from Pyramids of a Saturday evening. I only found
out a
week or ten days ago that the spacious, gardened clubs of the rich keep
lists
of people offering native speakers’ English tutorials and that patrons
of those
clubs are used to paying $30 an hour for these services. So tonight
I’ll be
getting the names and phone numbers of these places on the Giza side of
the
Nile gathered together off the internet and start calling them
tomorrow. A
couple I previously knew of already have my details. I have a
copyediting
application in limbo with an Arabic language newspaper that is working
towards
launching an English edition (which they have already done in Beta ~
provisionally on the internet). The editor in chief says she can’t get
the
business office to cut loose with the funds for my position at the
moment and I
know independently that they are behind schedule on the launch of their
English
hardcopy version whose advertising revenue and the eventual addition of
advertising to the web version being, one would guess, the source of
funds for
the copyediting position. But I have a little income from work at
Assim’s
hotel... and more if I want it. And my first pension check arrived a
few weeks
ago from one of my old trucking companies in America. So we’re some
months away
from crisis mode, financially, and Reda’s cheerfully frugal in the
meantime.

Whew. We just spent the day moving (from Apt 54 to Apt 44 in
the same building).

We’re done for the night and fairly well brain dead. The apartments are
identical so by the time we got about half done I kept having trouble
remembering if I was supposed to be taking stuff out or bringing more stuff in
as I wandered back and forth with armloads of things. Kept going downstairs
instead of upstairs when leaving 44 as well (one can only go down from 54 and I
was walking out of 44 on autopilot or something). Lots of small differences,
mostly negative. This flat only has one electrical outlet per room except for
the kitchen. No fly screens in this one, either, so we’ll have to do something
about that. The main breeze comes from the French doors and it isn’t easy to
add fly screens to them if they weren’t built that way in the first place. I
don’t quite know what we will do.

It didn’t rain at all the first year I was back but we had a real hot week from
about ten days ago and then it turned cold again and it rained and hailed and
the wind blew like crazy last night. And we’ve had rain several days already
this winter. And me... the motorcyclist. It didn’t rain once last year and only
two or three times the year before.

The English language newspapers that wanted to hire me couldn’t get their
financial offices to cut loose with a budget to do so but then someone helped
me look into tutoring intermediate school students and also adult business
conversation people.

By two or three weeks ago I found I was having trouble getting on English
tutoring lists at some of the “shooting clubs” and expensive “international”
(rich people) English schools because I don’t have a Teaching English as a
Second Language certificate. I found out I could do a correspondence course for
$200 or $300 but wasn’t that keen to be teaching or tutoring as I have very
little teaching experience and no tutoring experience at all.

So I let my fingers do the walking and found out there are 36, I think,
translation services in the Yellow Pages for greater Cairo. Not wanting to blow
all my leads at once I emailed five with a resume/brief about the kind of work
I was looking for – seeking to do “A native English speaker’s final light
editing”. They all gave me work and one of them has me all day, every day. I’m
condensing Charles Dickens novels to an upper intermediate, early high school
English as a second language level (when there is nothing else to do). And it
is also the closest translation service to home so that’s been a great bonus.

And then, thanks to Google, the Dutch embassy found my home page (which doesn’t
say “Israel Stinks” anymore) and they are now preparing a contract for me to do
about 10 hours of work at $38 an hour... their suggestion of a reasonable
price, not mine. So, all up, it looks like we’ll have a car and be saving for a
house (apt.) by the end of summer or so. I’ve only had two employers, really,
in the last 20 years, Linguistics – RSPAS – ANU and an Omaha trucking company,
so I’m not used to seeking work. I didn’t know where to start but it all came
good.

We took a two year lease on our new place upon Reda expressing her desire to do
so. She wants to spend 15 April 2011, the day she mandatorily retires, until
about two years from now looking for a place to buy. We’re happy in the burbs
for the moment but we miss the barrios where everything is just out the door
and life on the street is so invigorating. No idea what we’ll do. The newer developments
and even the 20 or 40 year old development we live in aren’t half full and even
when they do eventually fill up, they just don’t have the density for the neighborhood
markets and street life we both miss out here.

I starting writing these notes a few nights after I met Reda
11 months ago saying, retrospectively in a preface I added at a later date:

“Within 30 years, Delta and Upper Egypt migrants and their descendants will
account for some large portion of Cairo’s peoples, a status they hold even
today. But in 30 years they will be Cairo’s pre-eminent constituency.”

Learning more since about the demographics – 20 million live in Cairo, 20
million live in Upper Egypt and, my goodness, 40 million live in the Delta....
over half of Cairo’s 15% annual population growth is due to young singles and
families arriving from Upper Egypt and the Delta. I am told, literally, there
is no more water in the Nile to further expand farming in either place.[1]
Family size is down but youth unemployment is high because of much higher birth
rates 18 years ago and more. Not all these young people arriving to Cairo are
literate. There is often a ground floor room or couple rooms designed into
buildings where the doorman lives with his family... commonly illiterate Upper
Egypt men in their 30s and their wife and children. But their children do go to
school and so onward the generations march through time.

I thought for some months that both Reda’s parents were both from El Minya in
Upper Egypt but Reda’s father turns out to have been from Alexandria. So she’s
immediately related to people from the emerging constituencies of both Upper
Egypt and the Delta as well. And typical of how they intermarry in Cairo...
with each other or anyone else they feel leads an upright life. It’s twice the
fun for us. We’ve been to the farm in El Minya and will soon be in Alexandria
again where her cousins’ children are mostly in their 20s and have moderate
numbers of children to bounce on our knees.

A Reda story that I thought I’d tell tonight is about the night she lost
something off a toktok (tricycle motorcycle taxi - Latin
orthography “toktok” sounding more like “tuktuk” sometimes because there is no
difference in Arabic) after we were married but before she started riding
on the back of my motorcycle.

We were on our way home from visiting her sister and she had
armloads of plastic bags full of fruit and vegetables. We walked, me pushing
the bike, to the thoroughfare where she got on a tuktuk with all this stuff and
I got on the bike and followed along. About a kilometer away from her sister’s
place one of her plastic bags about the size of a deflated basketball fell out
of the tuktuk and I stopped and picked it up. It was wet and slimy and smelt
like the alcoholic who died in my apartment house in Copenhagen one
Christmas. He had the heat turned up in the flat and his body wasn’t found for
a week or two. Another bag kind of flopped off the tuktuk and onto the street’s
sand and dust about 100 meters later and I shook my head and drove on. She was
dumping her sister’s kitchen rubbish.

What happens to it in that particular place, and through
much of Pyramids, is that Bedouin shepherds bring their sheep and goats through
the next day and all the organic stuff is removed as the herds forage through
the bags people have pitched since the herd was last there. Then self-employed
trash collectors come through looking, by individual specialization, for
cardboard or plastic bottles or empty tins. There are perhaps dozens of specialties.
Some just drive about on the carts calling out, “Bikiya” (second hand) and
dismantle things for parts or other recycling. They start very young when their
parents take them out of school to help. They know no other life or work and are,
perhaps, mostly illiterate. In this and other ways, over 80% of Cairo’s trash
is recycled... a testament to the government’s effective fostering of informal
solutions to things they don’t have a budget for and, also, a different kind of
testament to using a soft hand with urban or rural poor people who take their
children out of school to work. On the matter of Reda’s missiles onto the curb,
nothing is left but tens of millions of, mostly white and shredded, empty
plastic bags blowing through the neighborhoods like snow in a northern winter,
invisible to the eye of the residential beholder.

I was up to a friend’s place on the 10th floor of
one of the area’s grand new apartment buildings, standing on the balcony
smoking a cigarette, and called to my friend, saying that “a very wealthy man
is walking down the street.” He came to look and I pointed to the man leading a
flock of sheep down on the street. He laughed merrily and said, “Those sheep
belong to the man with the new car business” (around the corner). I had assumed
all were Bedouin doing well in the city.

We got moved into our new flat some days ago. Then just as we were sitting
around huffing and puffing from our exertions of the day, the old landlord
telephoned and asked us if we’d like to move back in to his flat again. His son
is still getting married but is being posted overseas so the flat isn’t
presently needed by his family after all. I don’t have time to move again due
to favorable volumes of business coming in for my native English speaker copy
editing work. Reda will moan for three months, her cousin Assim predicts,
because the rent in our new place is about $30 higher. But for a dollar a
day... I ain’t gonna move again. But I’ve designed the fly screens for our new
flat, which has none, and am going to buy the tools and put them in myself.
Reda’s endlessly intrigued that both my grandmothers grew up on farms and
attributes anything I can make or fix to those good influences.

“Badaghaz” (bottled and piped natural gas or perhaps, I am now wondering, the
name of the stove itself) hookup came 10 days or two weeks after we moved into
the new flat. So now Reda is again cooking the last of the cow parts she froze…
which I can no longer identify. But that’s a story previously told.

A week ago made right about fifteen months since I gave my carpenter LE4000
($800) towards an LE6000 project to do a major office desk and bookshelves
project for my own little flat that I then moved out of when Reda and I got
married and moved into another, and now another, place. The following is pasted
from a letter I drafted to the tourist police telling the story.

Sometime between the end of February and the end of March, 2009, I deposited
LE4000 with Mr. Ashraf for the construction of a large desk and office set for
my home on Abdullah El Bahar Street. The total cost was to be LE6000 and LE2000
would be due upon completion of the work.

But in April 2009 I was introduced to a woman, we decided to get married and
were married in May, moving into Building 38, El Remaya City.

The LE6000 project was to be custom built for a particular room in my Abdullah
El Bahar Street home. I went to Mr. Ashraf upon moving to El Remaya City.
Actually he was present when we signed the lease. I informed him that the
LE6000 project was too big for our new home. I then asked him to build a
smaller project. I asked if he could build it to about the same size as a LE3000
project he had done for me in about three months’ time the year before. With
him in the new house we measured the place the desk would go.

He had done nothing to start the LE6000 project so this was no inconvenience to
him. We agreed that he would build the LE3000 project and that he could keep
the other LE1000.

There was never any receipt from Mr. Ashraf nor any contract. There had been
none for the project the year before. But a mutual friend, Assim El Sersy, was
witness to conversations surrounding the two projects as they developed. He
witnessed these conversations at Mr. Ashraf’s shop, at my home, at Mr. Assim’s
hotel and other places we met. Mr. Ashraf came to my wedding. There were
various places we met and Mr. Assim talked with Mr. Ashraf and myself about the
nature of our agreements. I think we can expect that Mr. Assim will provide
evidence if Mr. Ashraf wishes to complain that I have said something untrue.

There is now a big problem. Mr. Ashraf did not start the project for about a
year. Various pieces of the project have now simply been lying around his shop
for several months, are becoming damaged and have never been completed. And now
Mr. Ashraf, and Mr. Assim saw Mr. Ashraf do this, has begun asking for an
additional LE1000 to complete the project.

---------------

I had the letter translated by Mr. Ibrahim who owns the translation service
I’ve been working with for some months now. He printed it on his company’s four
color letterhead, stamping the translation as certified with two different
kinds of stamps at the bottom. This was about ten days ago on a Thursday.

The translation service is two turns down side streets from a major U-turn
junction on Faisal Street and the carpenter’s shop is two turns down side
streets on the other side of the U. We generally wander away from the office at
about 4:15 pm (mine is thus a seven hour day which begins at about 9:15 am as I
wait until 9 am to leave our house, the traffic being quite wretched up to 9
and quite lovely immediately afterwards).

So upon leaving the office just after 4 pm a week ago last Thursday, I folded
the letter into thirds, put it in a nice envelope, put the envelope in my shirt
pocket and motorcycled to the U-turn in the median and across, going the wrong
way down the last 40 metres of Faisal Street, as cyclists do, and turned onto
the first side street. I didn’t have to turn down the second because Ashraf,
the carpenter, was at the falafel shop right where his shop’s side street
intersects with the main side street. He tried a bit of hail fellow, well met,
but I was immediately occupied with getting the bike turned around and pointed
back at Faisal Street, gave it a shot of gas, lurching towards him, slammed on
the brakes as I came up to him, pulled the letter out of my pocket, handed it
to him with a snarl, and blasted off, showering him with gravel from my
spinning rear tire.

He had been served.

This was 4:20 pm.

At 5:20 pm I was at home and there came a call from “General” somebody at
Ashraf’s shop.

“Aii-iiy-wa (Ye-e-ess)?” I said, unruffled. We rent our home from a general.
Our last landlord was a general. Our apartment building is full of generals.
The building super is a retired general. If Ashraf wanted me to talk to a
general, I guess I could get a few generals to talk to him. But better save
them for another day.

The general on the phone could apparently think of nothing
more to say and Assim, my old, old friend who owns the hotel and married me off
to his cousin Reda, came on the line and said, “Ashraf is saying to pick up
everything on Sunday.” I thanked him and Reda called Ashraf for me on that
Sunday to sus it out. It would be ready, “tomorrow” and “tomorrow” was the word
again the next day, Reda gaily conversing with him a bit extraneously each day
to sustain the fiction that it was a friendly phone call.

On Wednesday I drove by his place after work, passing the
shop and ignoring Ashraf’s beckoning me to stop and talk, making a U-turn about
20 meters down the street. The pieces of my desk and book shelves were all
completed and sitting against the buildings on both sides of the road. Probably
he didn’t have the money to send it all to the paint shop for lacquering or
whatever it is he usually does, and I called out to him as I drove back past
his shop that I would return after 10 pm with a truck.

Reda and I motorcycled back to that neighborhood at about 10 pm and started
looking for a truck. It’s the city that never sleeps. Trucks for hire
congregate at nearby bridge over the Mariotea canal nearby. Some were too big
for Ashraf’s side street, some were too small for the load, some were too
expensive, some drivers looked just a little bit crazy and on we went, Reda
bargaining at last for one that had a driver and an extra man.

When the deal was made there was then a long conversation about how to get to
the shop, when finally the men said, “Oh, Ashraf. We’ll see you there.”

Reda and I took some wrong way street shortcuts on the motorcycle to Ashraf’s
while the men made a legal trip with the truck, all of us arriving at the same
moment, as it turned out. It was all sweetness and light, we got the stuff
loaded, down the road and up the hill to our house, up four flights of stairs,
into the guest room/office and off to bed before midnight. I’ll stain and
varnish it myself, who knows when?

I’ve worked over 1000 hours, 1500 perhaps, at home with boxes stacked on each
other for a desk since giving Ashraf the LE4000 15 months ago. I didn’t really
want to go on for another 15 months checking twice a week to see if it was all
inching along or something.

The power of the press. Perhaps I shall write more letters
to the Pyramids Monument Tourist Police Station in the future... that I never
deliver to them. It was a sufficient threat this time around just to ask the villian if he would like me to send the letter.

Well, my monthly charges at the bank went through yesterday without overdrawing
anything and I thought I’d give pen to certain... interested parties.

=

Yesterday also firmed up some new arrangements with a new customer for ATS
translation where I work. It is a customer I found. He had Googled for “native
English speaker copy editing Cairo” about six months ago, lining up his ducks
for services he would be needing as he prepared to crash into forming an Africa
infrastructure news service (for international construction companies,
technology companies, etc. wanting to know about government tenders around
Africa).

As it does today, or even Googling just “copy editing Cairo”, my website came
straight to the top six months ago. And also, “native English copy editing”,
for which I continue to be number one in the world. I’d be a little bit rich if
I could tell people how I did it but I don’t actually know why it is tops in the whole world. Anyway, it only
brings in about four or five large assignments a year.

Quite unexpectedly, I loved my Peoples of the Pacific Islands elective and
Introduction to Archaeology courses in about 1973. Between the two the whole
direction of my studies changed entirely. I struggled with the idea of leaving
African economic studies... leaving that “investment” behind... but it was a
particular repressed insight on a particular day at a particular hour at a
particular moment that burst out of my subconscious and calmly said, “The
Pacific is full of wonderful small peoples with wonderful small problems, with
a romantic prehistory and... besides... the population of Africa is going to
double twice by the end of the century and the economies will not.” It was
those precise words. I will never forget them.

I finally faced it. I simply didn’t want to watch those
unhappy African stories unfold for the next 40 years. And suddenly I was free.
I was gone. That’s the last moment that there was any inner conflict and
suddenly I was in graduate school studying language in prehistory in the
Pacific Islands.

I never lived in a huge city where my various lives keep
proving useful as they do presently.

I was on Saipan for some years when it hardly had an economy.

Then I was back in the American Midwest from the mid-1980s just in time for a
long recession.

Then I was in Australia just in time for “the recession Australia had to have”
but insulated from it by a large scholarship and certain university employment
in a different department.

Then I was back in America just in time to watch the neo-con bubble inching
towards the wreckage that would surely come. I saw it before in the Savings and
Loan excesses when they were neo-con deregulated in 1980s and wondered how it
was materially different than the subprime bubble – but the scale this time was
of an entirely different order.

But then there was Australia again and the dreamy grant Andrew Pawley and
Malcolm Ross had... finishing up things I hardly imagined 30 years before that
we would see completed in our lifetimes. It has taken and continues to take me
into a lot of studies on matrilineality... an unexpected result because few
MalayoPolynesian societies in the Pacific are still matrilineal... but they
were as they migrated into the area 3500 years ago (Hage 1998, Hage and Marck
2003, Marck 2008). Similar results for Bantu and other Niger-Congo speaking
prehistories in Africa: matrilineal migrants. I’m looking to get to Brussels
again and the Africa library there in the coming years.

Anyway, I was able to watch the neo-con wars, the neo-con economic implosion
and the neo-con oil spill from afar.

I’m in this vibrant economy – six percent annual growth again this year – that seems
set to give me the kind of retirement I imagined when I bought my little flat
here in 2005. Really hard work this year, but more like picking and choosing
next year, and more so the next, and the next...

People work hard here and life gets better, at least a little bit, for most
people most years and seems set to go on like that for a while. America was
influential in encouraging the economic liberalization that’s behind it. The
Yank government isn’t always wrong about everything Middle
Eastern. And when it is the Egyptians blame the American government for poor
leadership rather than the American people for poor followership. Still, few
people know I’m also American and I never bring it up in conversation. And it
is always my Australian passport that accompanies me to driver’s license
renewal, etc.

It was a stroke of luck when one of the young people in the neighborhood loaded
a copy of “Australia” (Nicole Kidman in the northern desert) onto my computer
and Reda and I watched it one night. “That’s Australia?” she asked. “Yes,” I
said without qualification. “When can we go?” she wanted to know.

Reda’s had cataract laser removals. Or I guess it’s ultrasound but here they
call it “lazer” in colloquial Egyptian. One about 40 days ago and one about 15
days ago. They turned out just great. The phone company seems to pay for
everything on their health plan. 50% of Egyptians have health insurance
somehow. I’d never have guessed that but now I’ve noticed that figure mentioned
in two reliable sources. And hers continues after retirement, Mr. Ibrahim tells
me.

She came home one day with a purchase order from her health
plan with a lot of medications on it and “cataracts” on one of those lines.
That was the first I heard about her cataracts. I only knew that she kept
rather bright lights on in the hallways at night. She said she’d like me to
take her to the hospital the next day. I assumed it was for a consultation but
it was for the surgery itself and we were there all day, me dozing off in the
waiting room and she getting quite upset about it as had the guys at the
motorcycle mechanic’s place the night before. I had been working 60-70 hour
weeks for a couple months by then and finally… I did it. I dozed off in public.
Twice. And really offended everybody.

Live and learn.

Anyway, she’s been off work all of the last 40 days or something and sleeps a
lot during the day and rattles around the house into the wee hours. So I do,
too. I knocked back to 35 hours a week before starting the English teaching
certificate work 5 or 6 days ago. I’d been running short on sleep for several
months and finally just really wasn’t sleeping at all. So I’m feeling a bit
refreshed these last many days.

Reda and I are both still just terrible about language and it’s still all kind
of pitiful baby talk between us. But there’s a lot of trust and joy and it
doesn’t seem to matter much to either of us. And when it does Google Translator
remains our faithful companion. We get a lot of mileage out of well-planned
jokes and surprises, too.

I come home to find her working on the English CDs for a week or so and then I
get into the Arabic CDs for a while but then she finally says, one day, “I don’t
remember any of this stuff,” and I say, “I don’t either,” and I guess
one just really doesn’t so much anymore at our age. But we find ourselves going
back to the CDs every few months and have another go at it. She has more and
more vocabulary coming back to her from rote memorization in secondary school.
I have the immersion advantage. We both have each other. We’re just kind of
happy and don’t care. And there is progress, however slow.

Mr. Ibrahim (BA English, Grad Dip Linguistics), his wife (BA English Education)
and Reda and I are planning out a book of Cairo Arabic verbs. The most common
ones. Which, as in any language, are the most irregular. It will force me to go
over it again and again and again. And this book of verbs will be designed to
get the user accustomed to the pronouns, prepositions, common juxtapositions of
people, places and things, etc. and not just the verb tenses etc. There isn’t
anything quite like what we’re planning on the shelves of the American
University in Cairo Bookstore and they routinely stock everything on Egyptian
Arabic so they’ll probably stock ours.

I’ve looked for lexicography projects since I got back in 2008 (that I might
volunteer on and similarly force myself into a book, again and again and again
going over the same material, even at the level of data entry and proofing) but
I’ve met most of the “real” (theoretical) linguists in town... there aren’t
many of us and we meet once a month on Saturdays... and no one knows of any dictionary
projects, etc.

Reda and I were up the Nile in El Minya overnight, leaving just after I got
home from work on Thursday.

I didn’t see the kind of activity on the floodplain, as we drove in yesterday
evening, that I saw this morning coming back.

As we drove the Nile floodplain on its main roads coming back late this morning
in the Peugeot 504 station wagon bush taxi with six other passengers and the
driver, I saw some hundreds and hundreds of men by ones and twos on donkey
wagons but mostly by twos on small motorcycles hauling their little
petrol-powered irrigation pumps and sort of nine to eighteen foot, 6 or nine
inch diameter pump hoses to the fields. The taxi driver was just great...
always slightly under the speed limit and taking every kind of sensible
precaution with oncoming traffic, etc. I relaxed and enjoyed the sights.

Some significant portion of water use is unregulated at the level of the
individual farmer. If you have land and there’s a canal running by... you can
pump from it. But of course the canals are thousands of years in the planning
and making and it’s all pretty logical, according to the engineering
assessments, of how to make water available to the whole floodplain...
districts thereof, actually.

What is now regulated is the making of new farms fields, as I understand it.
For millennia and millennia people just expanded the farms and canals as their
families grew. But now, as I’ve mentioned once or twice over the months, there
are at least some areas where the area as a whole is using its quota of water
running into its district’s canals, there can be no more water allocated to the
district, and no one can open up new land (i.e., prepare more floodplain for
irrigation) and one, especially, cannot pump onto land not registered as
irrigation land. But as a practical matter, I suppose they don’t extend the
canals into those areas, anyway. So it’s all pretty simple at that level and
these guys sort of burst out of their residential compounds and onto the roads
all at once as if police in cruisers coming onto the streets from their station
for their day’s shift. It made me wonder if there was a specific time they knew
that the water level of the canals would rise. They live in grander and lesser
villages and settlements and not in the middle of their individual fields like the
Yanks or Aussies... all off at 25 kph on motorcycles (always a second man to
carry the pump and hose) or donkey carts (often, or perhaps usually, with just
one man) to their fields outlying a few healthy kilometers away.

I wondered at the scale of the retail donkey cart business and where they are
manufactured. They have nice, sturdy springs and wheels as on light to
mid-weight family cars. They were all small wagons today that a single donkey
can pull when full. Somewhere they have larger two donkey carts but none were
in use for this morning’s purposes.

I wondered again if our driver would make ample adjustments for this traffic
but I needn’t have. He was once again a dream and assiduously kept his speed
down and gave a wide berth as we progressed through one vast expanse of fields
and its flurry of irrigation equipment transport, through village areas, and
then on through more fields and small equipment on the road.

It’s as flat as south central Manitoba and Minnesota/Northern Iowa. It’s the
height of summer and all the floodplain was green with one thing or another
unless something had just been harvested and was only stubble. There were no
bundles of fodder from these cuttings laying around as one might imagine a neighbor
or perhaps more distant districtman might be glad to liberate anything left
overnight.

I saw grape fields close up for the first time. Or took good notice for the
first time because they were bearing fruit and I finally knew what they were.
They grow the plants in little bushes of about three feet in height and
diameter... no climbing sticks or wires for vines, no nothing that I saw... and
we’ve been having the lovely purple and white fruits for what seems like months
now. I think they were 80 to 110 American cents a kilogram this year, the white
ones less, and the purple ones more, where I didn’t know what they cost last
year... I just never noticed because they were so cheap. They were half the price
and less 5 years ago, I remember clearly. But now perhaps they are said to have
gone more onto the international markets and doubled in price due to export
competition/pressures.

It’s not currency inflation that’s driving those particular prices up. The
Egyptian pound is steadily, year after, year... right at 5.4-5.7 per American
dollar. Australia’s currency exchange rates fluctuate with the Egyptian pound,
but only when the Australian currency is having its own ups and downs. Over any
appreciable period of time the Aussie dollar comes back to 90 US cents and 5.0
Egyptian pounds.

So, this stuff is kind of rolling through my mind, the grape prices, the end of
farm expansions, and, more personally, the recent increase of cigarette prices
by 40 cents a pack because they finally started taxing them in the past month
or so. They cut back petrol subsidies a bit at the same time, I’m told. A lot
of second hand information and guesses perhaps. I didn’t notice.... driving the
motorcycle and buying whole guinea (pound, LE) amounts of “benzene” so I can
pay and depart instead of waiting for them to come back with change. I just
heard about this but don’t know if I’ll be able to take notice and make sense
of it next time I get fuel. I can never remember what, in a sense, the
unvarying price was before. It was 1.75 guineas a liter for one octane level
but I never noticed if that was the one I always got or not. One price was
always around 1.75 and the others were always some odder number I never
committed to memory. So, previously, it was about 1.25 a gallon, American and
35 cents a litre, Australian... the 1.75 guinea per liter stuff.

The road rose eventually where the floodplain and its farms ended and we rose
not fifty or one hundred feet to a kind of low plateau or former floodplain of
undulating, very low rises. I first, as we came towards the edge, noticed six
very tall, thin smokestacks sticking up out of nowhere over the edge of the
rise where the floodplain ended. I had noticed these for the first time yesterday
evening and wondered what they were. It occurred to me in El Menya that Reda
and I were communicating well enough now that I could ask her what they were
and I did so as they came into view on the way back. First I saw four so I was
trying to get her to focus on the number four and that there were four things I
wanted to know about standing up like fingers on the horizon, holding four
fingers up very straight and still. But by that time there were eight or ten so
we had to have another go. Then, all at the same moment, she realized what I
was asking about and a broad graveyard came into view with five or ten of the
smokestacks seeming to stand in the midst of the graveyard and I made a faint
noise of comprehension, thinking for an instant that they were smokestacks of
crematoriums, smoke belching out of every third or fourth stack of a Friday
morning. But then the small size of the surrounding population occurred to me,
dozens more of these smokestacks were appearing to the right and to the left.
And I then realized that I had never heard of Muslims cremating, and I was
uttering a little noise of deflation and misunderstanding just in time to
rescue myself from the opinion of the other occupants of the taxi. My little
noise started just an instant before their little groans over my initial
misperception. No. Muslims never cremate, I was told, eventually, after asking
Assim when we got back home.

They turned out to be the smoke stacks of brick kilns which I saw as our aspect
rose a moment later and then there was some further elevation that exposed kilometers
and kilometers of them right at the edge of dry side up from the floodplain,
desert edge, Reda gaily noting that I figured out what they were, with some
helpful pointing on her part. There they obviously had the best of both worlds.
A clay kind of substance to mine from the surfaces of the low hills and valleys
right at the edge of the floodplain’s high water table. I didn’t see any
surface water pipes at all and wondered if they mustn’t simply drill shallow
wells down to the porous soil of the water table.

I wondered what hundreds and hundreds of trucks it might take to haul all their
industry to Cairo, just as we had seen hundreds and hundreds of “big trucks”
(semis/lorries) waiting to be loaded with fruit and vegetables along the larger
canals where there are always substantial paved roads. I’d not seen anything
like those hundreds of trucks out in the fields since trucking, myself, into
and out of the American West Coast and Southwest desert “truck farms”.

Then came a beautiful sight. “Cairo” was only “140 km” away and our home was
about 15 km before Tahrir Square in Cairo proper, to which the signs always
refer. The drive was now through the desert where it is cheaper and more
convenient to build a superhighway and there would be only a few tiny villages
and too many, really, sparkling but empty modern petrol stations. We were
dropped off with the Pyramids to our right and our home up the hill on the left
and walked home. Which was a great deal easier than catching these taxis and
nice passenger vans to El Menya. They’re always full by the time they get to
our part of town. They muster 15 km deeper into the city so when we left
yesterday we first had to city-bus 15 km in the wrong direction.

We had been talking about going to El Menya for a couple weeks because this
week was the first anniversary of Reda and Zuba’s sister’s daughter’s death (a 40
year-old) after many years of battling Hepatitis C. Even in Australia, that
battle is rarely won. Or such was recently so.

But then there could be no further delay, because, tragedies of tragedies, the
very woman’s 45 year-old sister and her husband were killed in a motoring
accident. Almost a year to the very day after the other one had died. We went
to Zuba’s house before we left where she gave us money and other gifts for
their sister whose only two daughters were now dead.

We went straight to El Menya and straight to the sister’s house where I soon
passed out in the bed they made available to us. I hadn’t expected the trip
until the next day and had worked all night on my teaching certificate the
night before. When I woke up this morning it was with the knowledge that Reda
had not come to bed all night and when I went out into the lounge room she, the
dead women’s mother, and her son, Khalid, were right where I had left them 12
hours before. They had talked all night and they all looked just terrible. Reda
was ready to go. She was too disheartened to come up for the funeral the day
before and didn’t tell me until we were suddenly leaving yesterday, why we now had
to go. The rows of funeral chairs were stilled filled by men yesterday evening
when we arrived.

Khalid had told me last night that his sister and her husband had been driving,
the car rolled into an irrigation canal upside down, and they had both died
there. He sadly walked us to the main road this forenoon and took us to one of
the utes/pickup trucks in the settlement’s main street on the other side of the
canal, the ute driving us, and picking up more people along the way, to the
mustering point for the Peugeots and passenger vans to Cairo.

We didn’t talk about family business in the Peugeot but as we walked up the
hill to our home on the Giza Plateau after getting out of the taxi, she
explained that there were four children. Three are in university and will stay
there. The fourth is Mohamed who I met last night at his grandmother’s house.
There it was explained to me that he was the youngest child of the deceased
couple, was still in secondary school, and would now live with the grandmother
(where he will be innocent, obedient, industrious and loved).

Reda had about just enough energy to feed me, tell me those further details of
the situation, and no more. She went to bed and I went off to the mechanic near
my old neighborhood to see about getting my oil changed but he was too busy
until tomorrow. So I went off to find Assim to see about further details of the
deaths and to talk about a few other situations I might clear up with him.

Assim expressed his anger with the dead couple. All their anger. The mother, the
aunts, the surviving brothers. All of them. “They didn’t have to leave us like
that. They should of been more careful. God knows!” What they specifically
believe is that God knows, for all the eons ahead of us, what people there will
be, what, minutely, they will do of their own free will, and what will happen
to them in every detail just as he knows all such things for all the people who
have come before us and those of us alive today. We will have our own successes
and failings, they will, in the main, be of our own free will, but God knows
what they will be and where they will lead us from even before the time we are
born.

Assim was able to tell me a bit more than Khalid did last night. Khalid teaches
French and also speaks wonderful English but I didn’t want to sort of sit there
and grill him about the death of his second sister in a year. Assim had been
talking to Zuba the last two days and the crash was a single vehicle event on a
deserted road. Perhaps veering to avoid a stray cow or something... they
overturned... and slid into the canal upside down. Did they drown or were they
already dead? Why would I ask? Why would he spontaneously say? I didn’t and he
didn’t. I don’t even know if it was day or night.

There were happier things to talk about. I had decided to work with adult
business English conversation students for my $30 an hour when I get my TEFL
certificate in coming weeks (5 or 10 I’d say). People in the industry say this
is a sensible and possible full time aspiration. Mr. Ibrahim at the translation
service has a 12 year old daughter, Nada, who has been coming to the office
twice a week and I have been tutoring her. Practicing my TEFL lessons on her.
And I know enough, generally as a linguist and in the evidence of my self-taught
foster daughter, Iva, that if you can catch kids and work on their hearing
of a new language, the benefits in terms of their pronunciations of the
new language just kind of naturally flow with small amounts of coaching and
exercises. But this natural ability quickly fades from about 13 on up. Except
in Iva, who went off to New York City for some months recently at the age of 30
and came back to Australia talking like a Yank. Yes, Ivancica! I noticed. How rude
of me to mention it now....

So, I’m learning how fast 12 year olds grab on to good instruction, how quickly
they pick up the specific new sounds of the target language, and how quickly
they forget if I don’t have the right kind of exercises to send home with them.
So Assim’s daughter, Maria (Mariam) is also 12 this summer but a bit further
along to begin with and it is now that I want to bring her in on these twice a
week sessions with Nada. Well, she just about died and went to heaven when she
heard this and then there was the question of how to show her where the office
is. I would come at 11 am Tuesday and take her on the motorcycle, or we could
take the bus or we could take a taxi (just the once). Maria said she wanted to
go on the bus. But her mother said, “Take her on the motorcycle. She’s afraid
to do it. Make her do it.” It was all very gay and after Maria and I
exchanged mobile numbers I went home, Reda was still sleeping, and I worked on www.AmericansInCairo.org, a web
site I own, and then turned to this missive at about dawn.

I had told Assim about midnight that I couldn’t teach his older kids... he had
asked about that, too... because I have to specialize and that I’m going to
have the two: adult business conversation and children under 13 who need
tutoring or small group work in hearing and pronouncing English correctly. I
told him, “I have to get serious. I have to be making $20,000 within a year.
Reda retires in a year and gets a lot of free doctors, and operations and
medicine. People say it will still be free after she retires. Is that really
true?” (This all comes with her phone company employment).

“Yes,” he said. “But the Ministers have been telling President Mubarak that
there isn’t enough money. And he told them, ‘We can’t stop doing these
things for the people.’ And the Ministers told him, ‘We can’t go on
doing all these things for the people.”‘

Assim is very grateful that I never want to talk about
domestic politics. And I sincerely don’t want to. I never said “boo” about
Australian domestic politics or foreign affairs until I was a citizen and, in
the same way here in Egypt, I am a grateful guest of this nation as I was in
Australia and even then I never got involved in politics after citizenship
except in the area of Palestinian rights (and Israeli wrongs). But there are
times, such as this night, when I need to know what’s going on and Assim has
the most eloquent way of distilling it into the folk knowledge of the moment
and I always accept it without a word except, “Thank you.”

It’s well past dawn and Reda was up at 7 and left to take a bus to a (free, for
the moment?) doctor’s appointment having to do with persistent colon problems. “I’ll
take you on the bike,” I said. “I don’t understand this colon problem at all. I
want to come along and talk to the doctor.”

“I’ll get the doctor to write you a letter.”

“Hmph,” I said, lying essentially, and secretly glad for the chance to now
sleep all morning. The doctors at the phone company’s clinics don’t like the
husbands coming along. And Reda probably took one look at me and knew I’d fall
asleep there, repeating my previous hospital offences. As I mentioned some weeks or
months ago, falling asleep at the motorcycle mechanic’s shop one Sunday after a
long weekend of overtime into the wee hours. They’re all still upset.
Though less so every time I see them. Egyptians can get very completely
indignant and do hold on to it a bit. But they are also completely forgiving,
or at least completely forgetting, of all my faux pas so far... given a
little time.

There are reasons to rejoice, these days.

For all of Cairo right down to just about every single person I know.

The price rises and ratcheting down of subsidies comes at a
time when most of Cairo is sharing in Egypt’s 6.5-7.5% growth (and more) for
the last many years and last year and this year as well.

It’s the first time I’ve missed an American or Australian
recession in 40 years.

The US/EU neo-con recession hasn’t caused any hardship here. One of the most
significant effects came most of two years ago when computer components fell in
price by over 2/3. Every teenager in Cairo seems to know how to build a
computer. But this fall in components prices meant that, in Cairo, a new
computer, with completely new parts fell from about $600 to about $120. The
only people who suffered were the internet cafes because by the end of six
months or a year of the new, low prices so many households had computers that
their members were no longer filling up the internet cafes.

Which is huge to families with teenagers in school that need lots of computer
hours to muscle up their skills for the job market. And the major appliance
megastores are all packed from the moment they open to the moment they close – this
is Cairo and, yes, one occasionally exaggerates... but I think that helps paint
the picture. Things are terribly upbeat and I especially take notice of
the closest major appliance store whenever I drive past it and indeed, it is
simply packed with people all the time.

Another measure is what must be tens or hundreds of
thousands of wonderful $500 150cc Chinese motorcycles in Cairo, the rural areas
and small (upper) Nile and Delta cities. Just like mine… these bikes. Mine has
23,000 km on it in 23 and a half months and has cost me $2.10 Yank a day over
those months, an extra 79 cents a day if I were to depreciate the whole thing
in one fell swoop. The modern world, computers and motorcycles, have come to them.
They won’t all have to come to Cairo and Alexandria to find them or earn
the money for such things. They’ve taken a lot of the money the Yanks give them
and have world class farm to market roads, rural electrification and sewerage
systems.

The young people who want to buy my little flat were
thoroughly befuddled and then embarrassed when their “deal” with a bank “for
the first week in June” turned out to be only an offer to look seriously at the
application once the woman achieved the current-job-longevity-requirement in
the first week of June. So the first week of July they finally fessed up and
said they were having problems they didn’t understand.

“No worries!” I said (lit.: “No problem.”). “In Australia we apply to five or
six banks and they all say the same thing. Either they all say, ‘Yes’, or they
all say, ‘No.’ If they all say, ‘Yes,’ then we take their offers to a good
accountant who can read their offers and tell us which one is giving us the
cheapest deal with the least hassles and potential problems.”

“But isn’t that sneaky?” they asked.

“Noooo, it’s like buying a new car. They expect you to. You go to five
different places who have the same new car and see who gives you the lowest
price. It’s just like buying a new car. They expect you to shop
around.”

So every couple of days since then I get a merry call from them at yet another
bank where they are being treated courteously and the loan officers are glad
for the application etc., etc. It’s been such a great lift because I’ve really
been suffering for them, not to mention myself and my creditors. Other
potential buyers are appearing in the wings and the young couple will accept
this as all that can be done at this point in their financial lives if all the
banks decline. I specifically want to sell to them because then the whole
building will be owned by one family again, “my” family, who can parlée it into... well that’s another story.

So now I will leave off by slapping in a few paragraphs that haven’t found a
home in these missives previously. It’s about “residence”. And the subject at the
moment, has, indeed, been residence. Therefore:

“I married Ma’adi. We live in Ma’adi.”

I heard this said in Cairo in 2005. It was a 30ish man replying to the question
of where he and his wife had made their home upon marriage, she being from Ma’adi.

This was some weeks or months after I was looking for a flat to buy and my new
acquaintance, also 30ish man, mentioned that their flat was near his wife’s
parents and that it was part of the neighborhood into which I was buying, if I
was happy with the area he would show me, and the “house”, as flats are called
in Cairo English, that he knew to be for sale. He and his wife of similar age
were expecting their first child and they were happy to think that the young
woman’s mother and two sisters were nearby.

Of course these kinds of stories occur in a wider society where the male
prerogatives, concerning residence, are essentially absolute. A normative kind
of statement that can be made is that the wife, when living with her husband’s
family, seeks to isolate her husband’s resources from his family that surrounds
them, seeking for herself, her children and her parents and extended
family all that she can in the face of constant small pressures from his
family. I guess that same normative statement can be made when they don’t live anywhere
near the husband’s family, but of course when they do it is all amplified.

There are accommodations of various sorts. Two brothers in their mid and late
20s married two sisters in their early and mid 20s and took them to live in the
men’s father’s apartment building. I have watched the young ladies become each
other’s partners in microscopic passive resistance conspiracies and they are
endlessly glad for each other’s company. Some small group of men, perhaps two
or three, was discussing the young men’s circumstances with me one night and
there was a certain question of resource distribution in the air in that
patriarchal homestead.

“Well, what are their wives thinking of all this?” one asked, because it
involved an element of competition between the young men.

“Their wives are sisters,” I said.

“What?” a second asked. Neither he nor the first speaker seemed to expect me to
know of such patterns.

“Their wives are sisters,” I said.

“Well....” they both sighed, much astonished. “Then there’s no problem,” one of
them said, completing the thought both had begun to speak.

Just guessing at the time, whoever won the father’s favor would then be under
pressure from his wife to receive some share, she would divert some of the resulting
resources to her sister, who would present them to her husband, ameliorating
her husband’s hurt at not winning the prize outright. In fact, I wondered if
the father wouldn’t transfer the resources concerned to the son who would play
all this out the most elegantly... which he… eventually… did.

Outright matrilocality – which, for Cairo purposes, I would define
as renting
or buying in the bride’s mother’s building or neighborhood (bride’s
father’s
building or neighborhood if still alive and still cohabiting with the
bride’s
mother) – is common enough that one young engaged couple’s residence
was
undecided and the subject of some gossip in an office I visit
occasionally. “It’s
a crazy man who makes his wife live somewhere she doesn’t want to,” I
said lazily, as the office was entirely friends of the bride. One of
the eldest men looked a
bit ruffled and then said, “Yes, but we can’t say that.”

And my talk was cheap. I have no relatives in Cairo and we would, just
naturally, as we have done, live nearest my wife’s family as do most men who
have migrated here and marry women with local extended families. Convenient to
her place of employment, in our case, but not inconvenient to her family or
even “mine” on short motorcycle hops. Which is similar to another kind of
success story for the bride: the groom marries the girl next door. Then she’s
in heaven. Her mother will be right there.

It’s 1:30 am and Reda just called the landlord, one “General
Sami”, to arrange payment of the rent for tomorrow some time. I was amazed and
mentioned that I don’t call people after 9 pm at all unless it’s someone I know
who turns off their phone when they’re sleeping.

“No one’s asleep this early on a Friday night during Ramadan,” she said, taking
my hand and walking us out to the balcony. There she swept her arm grandly
across the panorama of the immediate neighborhood and indeed the lights of
every lounge room and most of the other rooms were shining where all but two or
three are normally off by that time of night.

“There’s no light in that one,” I said, pointing to the
single flat that wasn’t lit up.

“They’re not home yet,” she said.

Perhaps our memory of Ramadan this year will always return first to a really
wonderful evening Assim had for us at his hotel with his oldest brother, Ahmed,
and his wife – who I had never met before.

Ahmed’s 15 years older than Assim and, technically, it would have been him
watching over the brother-less and divorced (Zuba) and maiden (Reda) female
cousins all these decades in Cairo (their mothers were sisters from El Menya) –
but Ahmed was away those many years with an illustrious career in the Gulf… all
his kids got PhDs, etc. And then there was a sister of Ahmed and Assim at that
big Ramadan meal, a medical doctor, who I wasn’t seated close to and didn’t get
a chance to converse with much. But the star of the evening was Reda because
something amusing had happened at our house that Assim exploited for the
occasion.

It was just a few nights before that Zuba had telephoned. She no longer tries
to boss me around but I occasionally remind her of the days when she did… by
teasing her... which is what slowly made her give up trying to tell me what to
do all the time after Reda and I first got married.

If the home phone rings at 3 am, I know it’s Zuba so when the call came I
thought I’d do what I might do to rile her and picked it up, myself:

“Mish mawguta.” (Reda had arrived to the phone and was watching, amused that I
would mislead Zuba).

“Ley?” cried Zuba. (‘Why?’ – the only answer would be the hospital or something
– Reda’s always either here or at Zuba’s at 3 am).

But the answer was:

“Fii ręgil tani.” (‘There’s another man.’) Reda’s face lit up in delight and
she started pulling her right hand across her throat as if holding a knife and
cutting her throat.

“Eh?” Zuba said, shocked and mystified.

“Fii ręgil tani.”

“Eh?” Zuba cried loudly.

Now Reda was just flatly laughing, and reaching out to take the phone. A little
revenge against the sister who had authority over her for decades?

“La’a, aana kizęęb,” (‘No, I was lying.’) I said before Reda got the phone away
from me with her left hand, still making slicing motions across her throat with
her right.

After the phone call Reda picked up right where it had started and told me
quite happily and excitedly that now her family had to cut her throat.

Without knowing it, I had said the magic words. I attempted to convey Reda’s
amusement to Tarek, the great composer, a few days later. But he simply froze
as I said the specific words I had spoken. Suspended animation. I attempted to
continue with the story but, he was so disappointed that I knew those words
that decided I’d best act like I hadn’t spoken them and changed the subject.
There is a particular phrase in Polynesian languages and another in
Micronesian, both ancient we think, going back to the time of Christ and
before, having to do with men sneaking around at night with their girlfriends.
Young men would run from my office, screaming with laughter, to hear them
spoken (and the old and the proper are mortified to discover that a foreigner
knows them – I had seen Tarek’s sort of suspended animation when an Islander or
reacted, crestfallen, to my knowledge of such things in Egypt or the Pacific
Islands).

When I next saw Assim, I mentioned the phone call. He was instantly amused but
attempted a frown, saying:

“You can’t say that!!! Now Zuba has to tell us all!!! And we have to make an
investigation and ask everybody in the family to swear what they know!!!”

He let it go at that and since he was amused rather than concerned I let it go
as well.

But the inquisition did come. It was on the day of the Ramadan feast at his
hotel that I began the present story.

It was in a guest room perhaps 7 meters by 7 meters. The one my sister, Jana,
stayed in, come to think of it.

Tables from the dining room had been brought in for the meal and I had been
seated next to Ahmed, Assim’s (much) older brother, and we had some interesting
chats in English during the course of the meal.

Everybody finished eating and we were spreading around the room a bit. To the
couch along one wall. Pulling our chairs away from the table. Ahmed’s large
wife laying down on the double bed with Assim’s 10 and 12 year old daughters
sitting on the other side of the bed.

Eventually, there was a lull in all the conversations all at once and Assim,
stood up, taking a central position in the room, saying, as he swept his arm
widely around the room until his hand was pointing at me, something like,
“Huuwa olti, ‘Fii ręgil tani.’” (“He says, ‘There’s another man.’”)

The slouching young girls’ spines went straight as arrows and their eyes went
huge as they looked at Reda and then Ahmed’s wife and then their mother, Hanan,
as the latter two exploded wildly in utter mirth.

Reda was instantly beaming demurely and squirming in her chair like a naughty
school girl caught out about something.

The inquisition was on.

Assim formally and loudly called to the various blood relatives in the room,
one by one, asking if they knew anything about this while I chirped out
again and again that I had been lying and Ahmed and Assim’s wives (and Assim’s
sister, el doctora) laughed on and on, wiping tears from their eyes,
Reda beaming happily and making a motion of a knife slicing across her throat
every time our eyes met, the little girls incredulous and only gradually
understanding the accusation and that it was a joke. They sat through it all,
each with all eight small fingers her mouth, which spread their mouths wide,
their teeth clenching down on their fingertips, their aspect darting from
person to person as Assim, and the others, one by one, spoke.

Goodness. Everybody was so amused… and Assim, surprise, surprise, the
great maestro of those moments, was finally mock mollified and sitting down…
the conversations from before picking up where they left off. A cherished
memory of the day for the family.

Twice since, I think, I’ve been talking on the mobile to Reda, catching up on
where to meet later and there was to be some delay at her end. Both times I said,
with a light inquisitional voice, “Mafish ręgil tani?” (‘There’s no other man?’).
And twice the reaction of her and the people around me was the same. She
happily protesting that her family would get a knife and cut her throat if
there was anything like that going on. The people around me amused that I would
know that phrase and amused that I would play the jealous husband to my wife
(there were no children present). “Knife.” “Sikkiina.” Finally, perhaps, I
shall finally remember the word.

The next couple of times I stopped at their house, Assim’s
little daughters greeted me with speechlessness, eyes as big as the moon and
smiles as wide as when they had eight fingers in their mouths at the hotel
dinner. I didn’t known it was possible for the mouth to stretch that wide
unassisted.

Otherwise there are these nascent language services accounts from the rich side
of town that my ATS boss once didn’t want me to have on a freelance basis (but
now finds some of them bringing in not just native English speaker copy editing
work but then translation of the completed work into Arabic – which pays him
more than other aspects of the total job pays me). Not a great change in income
but I have to kind of put on the brakes and make sure these new clients are
getting taken care of properly before I go out and look for more. Sometimes two
at once want something done overnight. My rates are low with the understanding
that they will rise to the going rate by about this time next year.

Otherwise, still, I’ve been drafting grant proposals to get some of the Pacific
Island’s most productive breadfruit to tropical Africa (the present Pacific
Island breadfruit in Africa comes from the time of Captain Bligh, his crew’s
mutiny to some extent due to the pregnant girlfriends they had on Tahiti after
six months of carousing while waiting for the right time of the year to prepare
breadfruit cuttings for the West Indies [and transferred to West Africa in the
1840s]). What is now being shipped produces two or three times the Tahitian variety
of tree already there.

The world’s great Breadfruit Institute (in Hawai’i) turned
all their Africa contacts over to me because with the American recession they
have neither the resources to help write grant proposals nor do they know
enough about Africa to be of help in all the necessary areas. So I’ve learned a
lot quickly about the science of breadfruit and have found it fairly easy to
get NGOs in Ghana started on applications as 1) I did an African rural
economies BA and visited Ghana in 1971 and 2) I lived with breadfruit
cultivation for 10 years in the Pacific Islands.

Diane Ragone (rah-goh-neh), the Breadfruit Institute’s founder and director
writes overnight that US-AID might fund African initiatives (we missed, 31
July, the deadline for the Australian grant that would have been most
appropriate as we were just, at the time, first pulling information together).
She’s to go to the mainland and meet with them in DC. And I’m her guy in
Africa.

I don’t think they need my participation on any of the grants’ actual
activities though I help quite a bit with the bona fides of the African
groups. So I’ll just be staying here growing my language services accounts.

Still, quite an honor to be helping the Diane
Ragone... and the African NGOs. I’ll always be the guy who emailed or
telephoned out of the blue... the guy with the magic wand.

Samoa has licensed the genetic material to Diane and Diane has licensed that genetic
material to Global Breadfruit (Cultivaris) and they clone, in layman’s
language, and produce as many tens of thousands of “germs”, I think they call
them, as one wants, and raise them up to 6 inch plants with nice little root
balls. At $10 each, FOB Germany. We’ll probably be speaking of 500-1000 plants
in the Ghana proposal (as much as $50,000 all up – $5000-$10,000 for the
plants, ~$5000 in shipment costs, and then 3-6 months of central nursery care
before they are made available to farmers).

Thousands of islands over thousands year. And rare incidents
in prehistory that one of the crossbreeds resulted in super-producing seedless
varieties. And there are some Micronesian super-producing varieties. The most
bountiful breadfruit in the world. They out-produce the present African
varieties 2 to 1 and 3 to 1. They even out produce Belgium by dryweight when
comparing to grains and Belgium is the largest producer per hectare in the
world. Two varieties are shipped that fruit at complementary times of the year
– good for people who want to eat every day. Good for factories that want
product every day.

Prehistorically, the Samoan varieties concerned were,
perhaps, the source of or a destination for the breadfruit I was around in
Micronesia. I didn’t know there was any breadfruit in the world that
out-produces certain Micronesian varieties. Western Polynesia and Central and
Eastern Micronesia kind of stayed in touch after they were settled two and
three thousand years ago so I assume the best from the one place would sometimes
have made it to the other. I’ll find out over time.

This first grant that the Breadfruit Institute will write a
letter of support for goes to Ghana. It will test my ability to find NGOs that,
in turn, have or find agricultural stations where plant survival is most likely
to be up around 100%, as it was among Global Breadfruit’s first of its kind
shipment in history to Jamaica – where it is the national food and where the
shipment perhaps arrived to some fanfare. The second shipment went to Honduras
and was apparently met with suspicion by agricultural inspection teams at the
airport who delayed the release a number of days and there was significant
plant mortality. And there are no “valorization” issues in Ghana. Breadfruit
saved tens and tens of thousands of people, hundreds of thousands, perhaps,
from starvation or aid dependence in the 1983-1984 famine when all their other
crops failed and their Tahitian variety breadfruit trees kept producing.

Well, Muslims are celebrating Eid (‘festivity’ – there is only this one a
year plus the Eid that ends Ramadan) and the Yanks are all set to celebrate
Thanksgiving... the national starting gun for Christmas shopping.

Interesting work keeps coming in and I am transitioning to those in fits and
starts with the security of my children’s books production activities for which
hours are available to me any time I want to do some of that work.

The motorcycle continues to be an enormous source of convenience and continues
to cost about $2 a day – petrol, parts, service and licenses. And fortunately
none of my friends, rich or poor, have cars unless their work requires one.
Assim, Reda’s little-bit-rich cousin with the small downtown hotel doesn’t even
have one. Which is a great asset when Reda asks about when we might get one. I’d
say ‘Never. Lots of taxis are still cheaper than a car. And you don’t
have to park a taxi.’ Kind of moot points, though. We always take the most
dangerous-looking junky-looking bus before we take a taxi.

There has been one traffic ticket. It was an $8 ticket. Which I could have paid
on the spot (and left with my driver’s license). But I didn’t have $8 with me
(flat tires are only $4 for tube replacement and I think I had $5 or some
similarly slim surplus). So they kept my driver’s license and told me where I
could pick it up for $10. So "within a week" I had paid it off at a
facility that didn’t have long waiting lines, etc. But it was $20 – an extra
$12 for not paying on the spot. Not just an extra $2. And I didn’t have it. I
had the $10 and the standard don’t-go-anywhere-without-$5-for-a-flat-tire. But
some guy standing at the next window paying some dozens and dozens of slips for
a trucking company pulled $10 off the top of his LE50(=$11) stack that looked to
be about 9 inches high... and I was off and on my way.

I was at the motorcycle mechanic tonight. I’ve been around there a bit lately
as the return spring for the brake pedals age and give out after a couple years
– those factory-fitted from a couple years ago. But there’s a massive supply of
poor replacement springs in town and the shops are just kind of replacing them
once a week until they are all gone or a better supply shows up or something.
Now there’s the same problem with the rear brake-shoe retractor springs. So
possibly I’ll be stopping by the mechanic 8 times a month instead of 4. Or
maybe they’ll just replace both at the same time once each week for the
duration.

I was sitting in one of the chairs at the mechanic’s place reflecting on such
things when my eyes drifted over to the interior wall on which his tools are
hung. He now has two of everything... spanners, screw drivers, socket
sets... everything. Not just one. For the two mechanics who now make
their living there... not just him. Life’s kind of doubled up for him in
similar ways. Two years and three months ago he had a few Vespas (‘fesba’) that
he rented out. But then people like me started showing up with these new
Chinese motorcycles he bought two, renting them out, then a third and a fourth
and perhaps now a fifth and a sixth. And since all that was doubling nicely he
got a 14 seat passenger vehicle and has personally started plying the highways
and byways of Greater Cairo – they don’t try different things every day,
although they may be free to do so. They run regular routes, experimenting a
bit with others, to see how they might keep their van loaded most of the day
for the highest price. So his young brother-in-law, who he has been the second
man for two years or more, is now running the shop and training others and so
on it goes.

Not so different than Assim who added the 6th floor of his building most of two
years ago where the hotel/hostel was just on the 7th floor for the first five
years he had it open. Double the fun. Double the income.

The property situation is perhaps well out of hand now but it hasn’t yet
crashed like it did in America and Dubai and when it does it will involve
speculative luxury villas and apartments rather than the apartments most of us
live in. Too many in the far west of Cairo and too many in the far east.
Perhaps tens of thousands of them empty. As is true of middle and low income
housing but those have the thronging millions coming of age or immigrating to
Cairo to keep that market rather better balanced out. Reda and I hope for our
savings to intersect with the luxury stuffs’ prices’ demise on a two to four
year basis.

Some of the sleepy old kinds of businesses are going under. But there are
abundant examples of the world of consumerism coming to Pyramids and finding a
hearty reception: Arab and American fast food, car dealerships, appliance
super-stores, computer shops.

Otherwise, I have become the Breadfruit Institute’s ‘lead man’ in Africa. Which
pays for nothing… except for the sins of my past. See link below:

16 January 2011 Not what we might call "Mr Clean"

Six or eight months ago – yes, June it was or perhaps May – I told Reda and
various friends that I would then most earnestly begin seeking freelance work
from area translation agencies to do native English copy editing and that it
might be the end of the year before it came to much good.

I had been working since March or April at the closest translation service to
our house. But southwest Pyramids is not the place to be looking for work
touching up Arabic to English projects. I don’t know if I’m the only
"European" living in Pyramids but at that agency it’s all English to
Arabic – equipment manuals, doctors’ reports – things at a personal or small
business level that brings the outside world to them. So my time at the
translation office has been spent exclusively – not almost exclusively –
precisely exclusively – condensing Dickens and Shakespeare for Egyptian
middle school students.

I have a pronounced astigmatism which wasn’t diagnosed until I was 35 years
old. Long afternoons reading on the beach etc. resulted in sick headaches up to
that time which was when I first got glasses of any kind including all through
my school days and through a BA and two MAs. Consequently, before the diagnosis
and first pair of specs I had little interest in reading for pleasure or
purpose, but did so laboriously when circumstances required.

So, with three different kinds of reading glasses I started reading Dickens for
this guy in Faisal (Pyramid’s northwestern most district) in February and, to
me, it was thrilling. Dickens’ use of verbs not normally associated with the
action described so often created a good bit of inner laughter. Adjectives not
normally associated with the noun in question. Same thing.

The Dickens was just delightful.

But though it was "a far, far better thing than ever I have done", it
paid almost nothing so by about May I was looking for a polite way out and it
was handed to me on a silver platter by the translation service owner himself,
Mr. Ibrahim.

He went to Mecca in May, and made the minor pilgrimage which is the same as the
annual Haj except you get less "credit" for it... but can do it in
less crowded circumstances. It was also a bit of a business trip for him,
selling elementary level books for learning English. The Egyptian and Saudi
curricula are similar to some extent and Dickens and Shakespeare are a safe bet
in Egypt because such condensations are required reading in the public schools
and the private schools as well. So in a town of 20 million people you can do
what you like and try to sell it to the schools for their (4-6 million?)
students. It’s all out of copyright and Shakespeare, too, which isn’t actually
Shakespeare. Every last public and private school in town is required to have
their students read Charles and Mary Lamb’s 1810s prose summaries of some of
the dramatic works, simplified for middle school second language students.

Never was there one single copy editing job. By April I was looking for a
graceful way to branch out.

The opportunity came when Ibrahim didn’t pay me when he came back from Mecca
around the first of June. And he hadn’t paid the phone or DSL or light bill
before he left which were going out one by one and I had started staying home
to do my work for him.

"You can’t pay me?"

"Not yet."

"Assim just got back from Mecca, too. He took his whole family. He couldn’t
pay me either so he sold his car." Which was true but involved his 10 or
so employees at his hotel, not just me.

"You think I should sell my car?”

"Yes. I do. I’ve got to pay my rent and feed my wife."

He said no more and I left for the day. Whether it is some sort of special
license to all returning pilgrims or just him... I now had the excuse to go out
to look for freelance copy editing assignments from other translation outfits.
Ibrahim and certain others (partners in his school book operation) had insisted
that I not freelance when I came to work 7 hours a day for them. But there had
not been a single copy editing assignment which is what I applied for (its
higher pay, specifically).

So, with neither income from copy-editing, nor, especially, getting paid the
little they owed me on time, I let my fingers do the walking, found the three
or four next closest translation services, sent them CVs by email, and walked
in a few days later, a new one each day for several days,
next-to-cold-call-fashion. They were like Mr. Ibrahim. They were delighted to
meet me in person and all offered work as they had occasion to receive
appropriate commissions. I had seen this with Mr. Ibrahim and by about that
time I was beginning to understand what it was.

They had all seen the big commission slip out of their grasp
because they knew no native English speaker doing copy editing work. So that
was my entree to all these places. The big one that got away. They were all
just delightful, as was my current "employer" when I first met him.
But I was beginning to wonder by then what good it could do if they would then
advertise "native English speaker copy editing" as they all proposed
to do.

[here]

Look for yourself. Do it now. Google those words and yes, it is moi meme who is numero uno in the world, right below the two to five paid placement
outfits. And this was true at the time I was making these forays last June. It
took me two or three months from about February to move to the top. But it
results in very little business. Nor had it helped my initial potential
benefactor, Ibrahim of Faisal, to bring any new English copy editing work to
his west Faisal service. We both have services that report to us about visits to
our web sites and I, El Numero Uno de la Monde on Google, gets hardly any
visits at all and just five, as I recall, actually retained me (and all paid
when I was done, thank goodness).

Mr. Ibrahim’s web site visits are most predominantly from
people linking through upon finding him listed in the online Yellow Pages – which
has no dedicated "copy editing" category.

My breaks began to come from two men I hadn’t heard from much since visiting
them in June. One had a major corporation’s web site for me to copy edit some
time during the summer and thought he would give me a try. His client was quite
happy but no word from him came again until about October when he and another
agency started getting in touch quite a lot and then, too, a quite wonderful
man with an agency in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia started sending me editing and
proofing as well. I asked the gentleman from Jeddah how he found out about me
and it wasn’t my web site. It was someone he knew in Cairo, who he didn’t
mention by name, who knew of me somehow and that, perhaps, is the heart of the
story on how people seek such services as well – referrals from other clients.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, I had moved on to A Tale of Two Cities and it was
a joy to get paid to read it. Condensation ran much the same as with Oliver
Twist and David Copperfield – getting rid of 8 page adjectives etc. and just
leaving Dickens’ other magical words alone. A Tale of Two Cities was approached
as with the others but it was a shock to see we would need 1700 definitions in
the glossary when we ran the software to see what was in there (that is, 1700
words beyond the 2500 most frequently words seen in English late elementary
curricula). I think it was 400 or less for the others.

I’m not an educator and hadn’t really noticed the difference
but Dickens was using a whole different level of vocabulary in Tale of Two
Cities (Oliver Twist and David Copperfield were first serialized in newspapers
or magazines and only appeared as books afterward).

Then there was the Shakespeare work and Charles and Mary Lamb’s ~1810
"retelling" which was just that much different than Dicken’s English
of the 1830s to 1860s that it isn’t accessible in the same way. It had to be
heavily edited and then to-ing and fro-ing between using more glossary items,
getting rid of a lot of their words with modern synonyms when they are a bit
archaic. A tougher row to hoe than Dickens.

The work will always be there if I want it. And I do. I worked at Mr. Ibrahim’s
office 52 hours in October, 50 hours in November and 52 hours again in
December. I had a difficult master’s thesis to copy edit over the past eight
days. A guy in a certain regional government ministry who needed a formatter
and typesetter more than he needed a copy editor. So I haven’t seen Mr Ibrahim
for a week except when he called me to come collect my pay for December.

We had a good laugh late last month. His wife had their car and was at the
school where she teaches and the battery had gone flat. We went down there on
my motorcycle and between my on board motorcycle tools and some nicer stuff he
had in his car we started working on the situation. But then his daughter got
out of the car and closed the door and his wife’s keys were then locked inside.
So I scrambled over to his apartment on my motorcycle to get his car keys from
the baby-sitter and got back rather quickly. The rush hour was closing in on us
and we were all laughing as one thing we did and then another had no effect on
the stubborn starter.

Then I saw Ibrahim was some yards away on the main road
flagging down a three-wheeled taxi ("toktok" – from India) and
assumed he was off to buy a new battery. But then he and the toktok driver
drove straight to the car and Ibrahim pointed to the battery under the driver’s
seat of the toktok. It was the size of a car battery so for $1 we took out the
battery, hooked it up in his car, and the car started right away. The toktok
driver got his battery back in place and blasted off to make money in the rush
hour and we got the car’s old battery back in place and blasted off in our
different directions, laughing, to see if we could get to our destinations
before the rush hour had the streets backing up badly. We’re pals, now, I
guess.

Reda and I are still fairly pitiful when trying to speak the other’s language...
getting better glacially. Her more than me because her secondary school English
is coming back in bits and pieces. I’ve got my spoken Arabic CDs and she’s got
her spoken English CDs but we’re both about 60 and don’t retain much when rote
memorization is involved. We have better luck spending time sitting together
with the dictionaries working back and forth on vocabulary we want to know or
want the other to know. Spelling out the Arabic word with the Quranic
diacritics and, for the English, the symbols of the International Phonetics
Society helps me most in terms of memorizing and trying to pronounce words when
practicing them on my own without an Arabic speaker at hand.

So life involves a lot of good faith, a lot of Google translator and a lot of
jokes and surprises. The utter failure of tonight’s surprise is what inspired
me to sit down and write a small wedding missive.

The man on the ground floor who sells salted fat and sugar to the students from
the boys’ high school across the street had been cleaning up the empty shop
next to his sundries shop and suddenly, yesterday, the unit he had cleaned up
was filled with shelves and counters and display racks of fruit and vegetables.
And he seems to be set to stay open 24 hours a day as most fruit and vegetable
shops do. Which is great for a lot of reasons. 24 hour security for my
motorcycle which is locked to the lamp post 20 meters away, for one reason. And
something besides Borios (an Oreos copycat) for when I’m ready for a snack and
a walk – which might be at 3 am because some of my copy editing work involves
largish overnight jobs.

I noticed yesterday that he had iceberg lettuce which I had noticed at a very
few other produce markets though more so lately now that I think to look for
it. I had been feeling low in a not-enough-veggies way for a number of days and
it was like a dream come true to see this guy’s shop open up. And everything
is in season now, though less so for some fruits. The tomato crop has been
fabulous as well as for cucumbers, capsicum and a number of other things I like
but don’t know their names. And there’s too much of all of it. The tomatoes are
20 cents (AUS/US) a kilo, vine ripened, picked yesterday, etc. and about half
of it rots before it’s sold. Getting a little overripe in the farmers’ fields,
I guess. I can’t imagine how little the retailers are paying for them. The
trucks coming from the farms can be seen driving the neighborhoods begging the
retailers to take them.

The produce shops have a pleasant way of just piling one’s small bits of this
and that onto their scales and charging a "salad" price per kilo.
Today it all cost me $2.50 after adding a kilo of bananas to the salad stuff.
If I really want to make Reda feel she’s living a glorious life, I bring home
bananas, milk and sugar. But today it was all about salad and I contrived to be
in the kitchen chopping it all up as she came home from work. Well, she arrived
and just felt invaded. Big disaster. And she thought it was a plainly
crazy idea to be using iceberg lettuce for salad when everybody knows it’s for mashi (the rice wrapped in grape leaves
one sees at Lebanese restaurants and Arab weddings... grape leaves, iceberg
lettuce leaves, cabbage leaves, stuffed into small hollowed out eggplants – dozens
of ways to make mashi, perhaps).

So she fought the iceberg lettuce away from me, stuffed it into the
fridge, and then came over to the counter where I was cutting up the tomatoes
and started trying to grab the knife away from me because, as I understood her
to say, I obviously didn’t know how to cut tomatoes.

Egyptians will simply grab things from you or grab your arm and, with what
force they can muster, drag you away from something they don’t think you should
be doing. Well, I was not going to fight over a knife and came in here to the
office to write this instead.......

We’ve just had dinner this half hour later or more and there were tiny pieces
of iceberg lettuce in the salad. And they say contrition is puppy poop. Anyway,
she’s brightened up... which is what everybody says about her: "Kulliyom
mabsoota." (She’s always happy.)

We’re in a new flat again. This last general kicked us out early, too, saying
we had violated the lease by getting a land line telephone. And he only gave us
5 days to get out. I wondered aloud to my friends as to whether he had an adult
child who would be taking it or if there was someone offering to pay more.
"No," they all said. "Nobody wants you to put a phone in their
house. Or to get the electric or gas in your own name. Did it say in the lease ‘no
phone?’" "Yes, but why?" "Because some people will get
those things in their name and after 5 years go to the land office with the
receipts and say they bought the place but lost the papers. They never win
those cases. Or in some cases you can’t figure out who’s lying. But you can’t
touch them and it might take 5 years for you to get them out... all the time
getting no rent... all the time preventing you from selling it if that is what
you want to do... all the time wondering if the son or daughter you bought it
for is going to want to get married before you get rid of the other people. Nobody
wants you to get a phone in their house."

So here we are. Five weeks in our new place. Our concession to a legal system
that uses a soft hand when poor people or others make the aforementioned kinds
of claims. Many of them are illiterate but prove, in the end, that it was the landlord
who was trying to pull off a dirty trick. Actually our phone was never
associated with that flat’s address in the phone company records. It was a line
thrown down from the roof by people Reda works with at the phone company. But
it was a general telling us to go... so off we went. Up the hill in the same
"city of generals". Renting from a woman who bought the place from a
general years ago. Here the phone line already came down from the roof and
through the office window and there isn’t any "no phone" clause in
our present lease, anyway.

The move would have been a disheartening financial blow if not for this recent
blossoming of relations with the accounts that I developed last year. When we
decided not to take the general to court and simply move out as he was
demanding, we sat down to look at what our moving expenses would be. All up it
was going to be about $1000 which we didn’t have. The new landlady was going to
cut us some slack until January or something but that wasn’t the half of it.
But we just kept putting one foot ahead of the other and going through the
motions when two days later I got a large, short-time-schedule copywriting
project and then another and then another. I worked flat out at the computer
for five days while Reda field marshaled the house moving. My computer was the
last thing out the door and the first thing made serviceable at our new place
here. And the jobs I had by then finished paid $1100. $100 is huge money in
this part of town. Our "profit" from those days. $1100 in 5 days. But
it’s feast or famine. I probably won’t see that again for a while.

The flat is a mirror image of where we lived before. I was, for a lot of days,
walking out of the office and into the bedroom rather than taking a left
towards the kitchen and the coffee urn.

The snow storm in Jerusalem in the middle of December was a big howling sand
storm here. It took days to clean the house up. We were protected from strong
winds better in the previous flats but we’ll be glad for any smaller or larger
improvement in the breeze through the summer at the top of the hill here we are
now.

Reda makes the occasional comment of late about buying the place, but at the
same time gets excited every time she sees a banner advertising a vacant flat
on the bustling main street near the apartment building she built with her
sister. The air is much fresher here. The flats are bigger for less money.
There would be a place to park a car if we get one. But I do love the life in
town, too, and the new places going up on the empty lots in our old neighborhoods
all have basement car parks. We shall see what we shall see.

Reda’s got 96 days to retirement, she tells me. She acts like it and has ever
since her cataract surgeries in about June. Really took the wind out of her
sails. She takes a lot of sick days, now, that she maybe doesn’t need, and I
notice her office now has four desks instead of three and hers is no longer the
big oak desk for the manager of that unit to preside over (she got that job
only a year ago or so, "Yes," she said. "Madame Noor turned 60
and retired. And when I turn 60, I’m going to retire." She patted a small
pile of papers on her office desk that she was working on and said quite
happily, "We have to."

Ours is a Muslim marriage contract. There are no civil unions under Egyptian
law. One is married in church or mosque or synagogue and divorce (which the
main Christian denominations don’t allow) is also defined and implemented
according to the rules and practices of one’s faith. In a Muslim marriage
contract the man always signs up to "take responsibility" for the
woman "from" her family... her father or oldest male relative signing
her away. I’ve never asked about her income or what she does with it although I
suppose her nephew Mahmoud’s undergraduate tuition is a big part of the story.
Last year was just plain tough financially but whatever little bit I brought
home she made it last and allowed me the dignity of being the household’s sole
source of support.

She talked recently about wanting to continue to work somewhere after her
retirement from Telecom. Maybe she will. The nephew Mahmoud has another year at
the institute after this one. But I brought up to her a general vision of
traveling quite a lot. "We could be in Damascus for six months...
anywhere. My work comes by email. It doesn’t matter where we are." So that
was news to her. We’ll go to Mecca first. If we went anywhere else
outside Egypt first she would just want to be in Mecca anyway.

At the electronics and IT institute Mahmoud is fast learning to use the English
he was only taught to read K-12. And he’s settled down to studying and other
better priorities than a year (?) ago when he was demanding an expensive
motorcycle or car and just plainly couldn’t understand why his mother and Reda
wouldn’t buy him one. Danish kids start buying all their own clothes when they
are 14 and move into their own flat when they are 18. Which was also true of
the Yank-Danskers as I was growing up. Such questions of whether that is better
for the youth are moot. Young people don’t generally have any way to make
enough money to live independently here in Egypt.

I procured a 10-20 weeks Teaching English as a Foreign Language Internet course
in about June. A respected outfit and the certificate from that course would
have opened lots of doors. But – OH – sick headache. The course rather assumed
that one would either have other teaching experience or be prepared to
supplement, on a self-starter basis, one’s preparations through readings of
certain theory and practice of education stuff. I could see myself slowly
slipping behind on a 10 week schedule, then a 20 week schedule. I didn’t see
how I could get it done within the 6 month limit. I was 5 weeks into it and had
lost 5 kilos from stress (plus the 20 kg I lost, on purpose, when I came back
from Australia in 2008 – I was beginning to look like Uriah Heep). The 20 kilos
went by way of a lot of walking. Most of 10 km per day for 3 months. The 5
kilos in 5 weeks was from stress and loss of appetite from the course so I cut
bait.

But it all came good. I’d rather work at home doing the copy editing. The work
is very absorbing, time flies and I finish up, usually, the day I get the
assignment or the day after. I email it off and that’s it. I walk down to the
cafe and by the time I get there I can’t always remember the project’s topic,
even if it took several days. Don’t care. Don’t have to care. The client
agencies do all the marketing and billing. They pay within 30 days and before
that if I ask.

When I hear the phone beeping with a text message it’s almost always one of the
agencies as my friends are all too old to fuss with texting much and it’s a bit
of a thrill to hear the phone beeping upon the arrival of a new SMS.

My PhD thesis supervisors probably think it’s a big funny joke that I would be
copy editing anything. But I do it at a level that seems to strike a
comfortable place in the clients’ hearts. And I do. Yes, I do, feel like I’m in
a Bourne movie when a text message comes to me at a cafe and I have to blast
off on my motorcycle down desert roads to get to my computer and send a quote
off or, alternately, just sit down and do the job immediately because the
agency’s already promised a client that "their" guy would do so.

The motorcycle – 28,000 km on the mean streets of Cairo in 29 months. We are,
indeed, enjoying our second childhood together. We will go to the far side of
town tomorrow to look at sewing machines. But we will take buses and subways.
We won’t leave until after the noon prayer after which one has an hour or two
to drive around town quite easily but then we would be driving back 20-25 km
through full-on weekend traffic by the time we were done looking around the
markets. Not a place for the faint-hearted. We don’t even go to her sister’s
house 5 km away between 5 and 8 pm on work days. It’s not so much dangerous as
it is very slow going and hard on my hips to balance two on the bike when we
are at a standstill.

It’s the Coptic Christmas Eve tonight and we just finished watching the
midnight mass on TV. Pope Shenouda seemed to be wiping away tears, as well he
might. And the congregation looked gravely terrified. Perhaps 20 Christians
were murdered in a bombing outside an Alexandria cathedral as they left a New
Year’s Eve mass. I only heard about it a couple days ago. I finally had time to
get the TV set up with its e]dish that day and the first thing that came on was a
Middle Eastern Christian funeral with two or three caskets being passed over
people’s heads into a cathedral. The sound wasn’t working yet so I didn’t know
where it was. I had heard Christians were being bombed again and again in Iraq
in recent days but only yesterday came to know that the funeral I saw on TV was
more probably for some of the people in Alexandria.

If the God-damned Yank Congress and presidents would cry like this when Israel
cluster-bombed civilians in Lebanon and phosphorus-bombed civilians in Giza
maybe they would stop saying naughty-naughty to the Israelis and start telling
them to withdraw the settlements and fucking well behave themselves.

Europe is united. There the people believe that the biggest threat to world
peace is Israel. Except for the UK people who think the biggest threat to world
peace is America.

[here]People no longer stand up when American ambassadors enter the room. Not
in Europe or the Middle East, anyway.

I just yesterday pushed the "Confirm" button on the Internet payment
that involved what I expect to be the last taxes I ever expect to pay to the
United States of America.

I shall never be helping to fund its violent adolescence on the world
stage again.

Why didn’t I know about the Alexandria bombings sooner? Because nobody even
talks about anything having to do with America and Israel. What
difference would it make? They don’t. I don’t. I’m glad to never give it any
thought at all... except upon seeing the tears of Baba Shenouda.

Egyptians wear long johns through the winter. They make all
the difference between enjoying Cairo at this time of year as opposed to often
wishing one were somewhere else. All my friends wear long johns. My wife wears
long johns. Her sister wears long johns. Our nephew wears long johns. Everybody
wears long johns. You don’t even have to ask.

I joined the legions and got some long johns for myself towards
the end of my first winter in Cairo in 2006, finally taking the Egyptians’
advice a month or two before returning to Australia 15 April. I left for
Australia feeling like I had discovered an entirely different city. I no longer
got cold in the outdoor cafes in the evening when the breeze picked up a
little. I no longer shivered through the evening and early morning working
hours as I rattled around the house. People don’t heat their apartments in
Cairo. Not in Pyramids, anyway. We all wear long johns.

I’m not the first Des Moines Luther Memorial Church person
to have retired to Cairo. My parents’ great friends, Wilber and Cleo Williamson
wintered here, as I recall, more often than not after they retired. Or perhaps
it was somewhere else in Egypt and not Cairo.

As an undergraduate African economies student, I had been to
Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia in 1968 and first came to Egypt after West Africa,
East Africa, Ethiopia, Eritrea and Yemen in 1971.

I was a student in Enok Mortensen’s confirmation classes
about 1962-1964. He was in Des Moines for a year or two, half time as pastor of
Luther Memorial, and half time gleaning bits of Danish American history from the archives of the Evangelical Danish Lutheran Church in
America Grand View College. I knew then that he was writing a history of
the Danish Lutheran church in America but it was only within the last year that
I learned of his many other books and I sent off for some of them.

Enok spoke to us briefly about something special one
Saturday morning, our small confirmation class meeting in the parsonage just
west of the Danish old people’s home, Valborg, and across the street from the
Grandview College women’s dormitory, although I don’t know what the latter is
now. He spoke to us of something he did when he was 17 or 18. He had come to
America with his family when he was 16. When he finished high school he got
himself to San Francisco, rode steerage to Japan and, from the Asian coast
somewhere, had taken the Trans-Siberian Railroad to Moscow at the height of the
Russian Revolution in 1917. He never said more about it than just those basic
facts. But it got my mind turning as to the things he might have seen and heard
when taking that route at that time and going onward to Denmark from Moscow. By
1968 when I finished high school I had also met Bob Shreck who went on to be a
famous cancer doctor in Des Moines. Bob’s tales of his Middle Eastern travels
when he was about 20 and I was about 15 also got me thinking I might do well to
go out and see a bit of the world.

I had come back to Cairo in 2005 to see if I might like to
retire here and I stayed the better part of a year. I was here in 2005 when Jyllens
Post published the Muhammad cartons. I saw the Danish products immediately
disappear from the supermarkets – yards and yards of empty dairy cases around
the neighborhood more or less immediately. I came back in 2008, retiring from
academics and getting on with my new life here. The Danish products had not
come back. Nor have they today. So neither can I comfortably tell people that
I’m American nor, since 2005, mention that my family was entirely Danish before
that. I had been living in Australia through the 1990s and have been a citizen
of Australia since 1999. So even before 2005 I had a more useful nationality to
mention than saying anything about America. Egyptians don’t often speak English
and when they do they don’t seem to notice differences in English dialects and
they commonly assume that I’m a native born Australian. I’m careful not to
disabuse them of that impression until they are aware that I am pro-Palestinian
and have been for a long time.

Ever since hitch-hiking from one Mediterranean youth hostel
to another in 1968, I had been witness to the common European opinion that
these settlements Israel was establishing in the Occupied Territories were a
cause for great concern. We young people in the youth hostels in 1968 swore
oaths to never visit Israel or buy Israeli products until the settlements were
abandoned, an oath from which I have never strayed. Charles de Gaulle, the
French President, had put it succinctly the year before: [Israel] is
organizing, on the territories which it has taken, an occupation which cannot
work without oppression, repression and expulsions… and if there appears resistance
to this, it will in turn be called “terrorism”. He was president of a
nation which had just seen over 100,000 people killed due to its colonial
project in Algeria – a project which France, in the end, had to abandon.

So there I was, late summer, 1968, properly concerned about
the settlements. But I was going home to where I had learned to swim at the
Jewish Community Center, had a very few classmates who were Jewish and had seen
a Jewish girl at our high school play Anne Frank most worthily some months
before in the drama club’s spring production. Enok had taken our confirmation
class to a synagogue the year he was in Des Moines. A pleasant rabbi spoke to
us and showed us around. My siblings and I were all aware of the Danes getting
the Jewish people of Denmark safely away to Sweden during the initial Nazi
occupation. I’ve had Jewish people point out to me that those Danish Jews had
to pay well for the help they received getting to Sweden… but so did one of my
mother’s cousins in Viborg when he went onto Nazi arrest lists after he and
another boy or two stole some of their troops’ rifles while their owners were
eating lunch.

From 1968 I’ve always had comfortable friendships with
Jewish people starting from that fall when I began university. I have never
felt it was difficult to separate Jewish rights and humanity from Israeli
government wrongs and inhumanity. I remember, especially, having lunch with
three Jewish people in Australia in the mid-1990s. There was an
Israeli-Australian who was glad to do long university years in Australia. One’s
time owed to Israeli military service was calculated according to how much time
one spent in Israel and how much time one spent in other nations where one had
citizenship or permanent residence. He was a lieutenant, I think, in the
Israeli army… and was called to service but little because he lived in Israel
but little. The second was a UK-Australian Jewish woman doing a PhD. The third
I can’t remember specifically except that it was a young woman and that I was
the only non-Jewish person there. It was all of them glaring at me for a
moment… me the American… when the subject of Israeli government excesses came
up. It was America that gave the government of Israel its license to steal what
it wanted from the Palestinians, not those Jews at that table or their families
or their nations.

I went back to America 1999 to 2004. I had not looked for a
pro-Palestinian American organization to join when I was back there previously,
1986-1991. But I certainly went looking for one in September of 2000 when Ariel
Sharon ascended Temple Mount under armed guard. By doing that he symbolically
proclaimed that there would never be an end to The Occupation, there would
never be an end to the settlements, there would never be a Palestinian state
and that East Jerusalem would never be its capital. Was he wrong?

Instantly there was the uprising in the Occupied Territories
and a good pro-Palestinian organization came looking for people like me in
those days. It was by way of the picture of the little Palestinian boy holding
his arms out as if with hand flags – or perhaps he did have little flags – as
he stood in front of an Israeli tank, blocking its progress as it advanced into
the little boy’s Palestinian neighborhood. It was the
picture the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC) splashed across
America in full page newspapers advertisements some weeks or months into the
rebellion. I immediately joined ADC and, with their help, I began searching out
Palestinians in the Omaha and Council Bluffs area where I was living and
working at the time. I found few Palestinians who could suggest anything useful
to do or say. Most of a year after Sharon’s fabled foray up Temple Mount, I
finally wrote to my senators from Iowa – Tom Harkin and Charles Grassley… I don’t
recall and response from Harkin. But I know it was Chuck Grassley who did because
I remember that he did reply by way of a forgettable six page corporate letter.
Had he come around to read it to me out loud, it would have sounded like a
person speaking with a mouthful of rocks. I marked up his letter with bits of
red ink and sent it back to him.

Then a few days later there was September 11th. I
was one of those 14% of American citizens or residents said, at the time, to
believe that we brought the attack on ourselves. Double dared them too many
times, in my opinion, then and now. Just asking for it. My blood
pressure shot up 30 points and only came down slowly over the next six months,
I was so enraged to have watched us do that to ourselves. I began to plot my
escape and worked especially hard on some Pacific Island prehistory topics that
might take me back to the Australian National University, a development that
eventuated in 2004.

I had been a polite guest of Australia 1991 to 1999. I was a
Meals on Wheels volunteer and a foster parent but did not get involved in
political issues… a spectator in “the recession Australia had to have” and
other politico-economic issues while comfortably ensconced at the national
university. But when I went back in 2004 it was as an Australian citizen
thinking of the future and I joined the Australian Capital Territory’s
Australians for Justice and Peace in Palestine (AJPP). Or, now that I think
about it, I only found them after returning from my 2005-2006 residence in
Cairo. Once again, a good pro-Palestinian organization found me. This one
through a poster on a pillar that I noticed when whiling away some moments
standing in a line for an ATM. I worked with AJPP for most of two years and
then came back to Cairo where I was going to have to plan out a cheap
retirement. I hadn’t had the consistent academic careers of Wilber and Cleo
Williamson.

I remember the years 1999-2004 back in the United States in
many ways but one memory that made me proud stands out. I was visiting Joel and
Karla Mortensen in Minneapolis. I was reading one of the Church and Life
issues from their coffee table and, like those in my mother’s (Anna Marie
Marck) home in Des Moines, it had some very useful observations on the plight
of the Palestinians. I mentioned it to Joel and he said it was our parents’
good friends Thorval Hansen and, perhaps,
Marvin Jensen writing up those articles. I remembered my father, Arthur Krog
Marck, mentioning that LCA[2],
or perhaps LCA and ALC[3]
jointly, had ongoing relief programs in Gaza. That conversation was in the late
1960s or early 1970s. I was glad to read the Church and Life articles,
to recall my father’s words and to think that one or both of the old synods had
kept some support going to Palestine and may have continued to do so after the
merger.

There were no feasts in Cairo when Obama nominated Hillary
Clinton as secretary of state. The Clintons didn’t even understand why the Oslo
accords immediately unraveled – they were either oblivious to the settlements
issues or felt that they didn’t have the political capital to deal with them
head on. Obama seems the same. His address to the Arab world in Cairo is only
remembered here for the inconvenience of having him in town for the day. Every
major road in Greater Cairo was closed. Obama’s speech was just more “naughty,
naughty” if he talked about the government of Israel’s culpabilities at all. I
don’t remember a word of it, actually. In any event, since that time, there has
been no effective American government action to reel in Israeli Apartheid
whatsoever. There is even the current fear that Obama will veto the UN Security
Council resolution concerning the settlements.

I’m older than Benyamin Netanyahu and I hope we both live
long enough to see the settlements and West Bank abandoned to Palestine as they
should be. That will be the price of America regaining some respect around the
world. For the moment the US government is kind of like mosquitoes in the
summertime or something. One can’t completely get rid of them so one makes
certain accommodations.

I never complained about the Afghanistan project but
wondered how America could possibly prevail when the Soviet Union and colonial
Britain before had failed to do so before. Thrice with respect to the UK. Afghanistan
was a failed state from which we had been attacked. But Iraq was a failed state
that had neither done us wrong nor had any relationship with Al Qaeda except to
keep it out. And where was the American government’s moral capital to be mucking
around in the Middle East, anyway? The Protector of the Shah. The Funder of
Apartheid Israel. Etc.

Boy W. George. The Great Connector of Dots. Conqueror of
Baghdad and Fallujah… Instrument of the Messiah… I’m not paying taxes for it
any more. Literally. A very few days ago I pushed the “Confirm” button on the
Internet payment that involved what I expect to be the last taxes I ever pay to
the United States of America.I shall neveragain be helping to fund its violent adolescence on the world stage.

My wife and I watched the Egyptian Coptic Christmas Eve mass
on TV about the 6th or 7th of this month, as we did last
year. The congregation looked gravely terrified. Pope Shenouda seemed
occasionally to be wiping away tears… as well he might. More than 20 Christians
were murdered in a bombing outside an Alexandria cathedral as they left a New
Year’s Eve mass. I only heard about it some days later. I finally had time to
set up our TV dish that day, as we had recently moved house. The first thing I
got the dish to pick up was footage of a Middle Eastern Christian funeral with
two or three caskets being passed over people’s heads into a cathedral. The
sound wasn’t working yet so I didn’t know where it was. I had heard Christians
were being bombed again and again in Iraq in previous days but only the day
after setting up the TV dish did I come to know that the funeral I saw on TV
was more probably for some of the people in Alexandria… the deadliest such
incident in over 20 years.

If the Yank Congress and presidents gave it a think when Israel cluster-bombed
civilians in Lebanon and phosphorus-bombed civilians in Gaza maybe they would
stop saying naughty-naughty to the Israelis and start telling them to
withdraw the settlements and jolly-well behave themselves. But I doubt that the
recent murder of scores of Christians around the Middle East made Congress want
to do anything more than what it is already doing… slogging on with their “War
on Terror.” Is that one up to a trillion dollars yet? Is the “War on Drugs?” I don’t
take much notice anymore.

Europe is united. There the people believe that the biggest threat to world peace
is Israel. Except for the UK people who think the biggest threat to world peace
is America. For myself, I think the biggest threat to American security
is the American Israeli Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). They have
successfully lobbied Congress to ignore questions of right and wrong for a
number of decades now. September 11 was just the beginning of the price America
continues to pay… the slow-motion knee-jerking that had Boy W. George invading
Iraq, for instance. Ignorant, violent, unreconstructed alcoholic that he is.
Spending trillions in the Iraq war and “War on Terrorism” whose most
significant effect will be remembered as that of driving Iraq closer to the bosom
of Iran.

Why didn’t I know about the Alexandria bombings sooner? Because nobody I know
in Egypt ever talks about anything having to do with America and
Israel. What difference would it make? They don’t. I don’t. I’m glad to never
give it any thought at all... except upon seeing the tears of Baba Shenouda.

TO HELL with the horsies the American Congress rides around upon. A president
who wanted to do right by the Palestinians wouldn’t be allowed to do so by
Congress.

It is one of the difficulties the Egyptian government faces
with its own population: the failure of the Egyptian government to complain
about Israel in any effective way. But the government is constrained by Sadat’s
Camp David agreements with Israel and both governments have promised not to
interfere in the affairs of the other… although Israel is scrambling to do so
now that President Mubarak may soon be taking a permanent vacation in Saudi
Arabia.

Egypt has at least 5000 years’ experience in distancing
itself from events in the Levant. But it leaves the government of Egypt in the
constant position of suppressing the moral indignation of its citizens who want
to ask why no one is doing anything effective about the government of Israel’s
theft of Palestinian land, life and liberty – and the question of why the
government of Egypt should continue such a cozy relationship with the American
government, a government which just goes on and on and on exacerbating troubled
Middle East situations.

The reason falls into the collective American lap, as the
Jewish people I was to tea with in Australia 15 or more years ago implied. The
government of Israel’s license to kill and establish Apartheid is a
specifically American Christian, ever faithful to AIPAC, license to kill.

The New Year’s Eve bombing of the Coptic cathedral in
Alexandria and the current flurry of email I receive from Australia and America
– about getting Obama to vote against Israel in the UN Security Council
showdown on the settlements – has me thinking about all this when usually I
don’t.

On a happier note, I married an Egyptian woman a couple
years ago. And she retires from the national phone company in April. A product
of President Gamal Abdel Nasser’s education reforms 50 years ago and more. Reda
did a two year electrical engineering certificate in an institute Abdel Nasser
opened up to women.

He personally visited her elementary school and encouraged
female education in what he said to those children and shook their hands, as
mentioned some weeks or months ago. So when I kiss her hand I kiss… It isn’t a
story the middle and especially upper middle class likes to hear. It was all
kind of Soviet and a lot of private land and production resources were
appropriated by the government without compensation for their full value and,
at times I am told, no compensation at all.

Reda mainly wears pants and capes and ponchos with her
headscarves.

It is almost certain in our Pyramids neighborhoods, that
almost any woman – or, especially, group of women – without headscarves is
Christian. I was telling this to a young Nigerian-American man who I took on a
brief tour of Pyramids suburbs some nights ago. “Oh, really?” he said, his head
darting about looking for Christians. There was one directly ahead of us by
about 20 yards. She was coming up to the bottom of the stairs up to the Metro
platform and he kept his eyes on her as we walked along in that same direction.
I had swept my arm to the south as we were walking a couple hundred yards from
the municipal bus we had taken from our home to the Metro station bus stop and
said, “There’s a big cathedral and other churches beginning on the next large
cross-street down there. Mostly the Muslims and Christians just kind of
comfortably ignore each other.”

“Look at that woman,” I said, raising my head and pointing
my nose at the possibly Christian woman his eyes had been following. “Nobody’s
bothering her. Look at the way she walks. She’s not worried about
anything.”

Egyptian Muslim city women were progressively giving up the
head scarf up to the time of the 1967 War. Then, like Jerry Falwell on
September 11, who came bursting out the door and blamed the attack on American
homosexuals and others. Many Egyptians couldn’t imagine that God would have
allowed what had happened to them in the 1967 War if they had been living right
just as Falwell imagined it was failures in American values that caused God to
allow the events of September 11. Here, from 1967, the women began to return to
their head scarves and the nation withdrew into greater religious
fundamentalism, just as America has in the last nine years or more.

Now there are some Muslim women giving up the head scarf
again. A very few and they are a bit like hippie chicks in certain ways –
seeking a more international education, world view and identity. Legions of
more and less educated young women are entering the work force and do not
marry, and do not marry, and do not marry and then they get to be about 35 and
there is the question, their embarrassed families’ question most prominently,
of if(no longer “when”)
they will ever get married. In most instances they continue to live with
their parents before marriage… even up to the age of 35 and beyond. They’re
supposed to and often do in any event.

I read some astonishing statistics about the number of never
married Egyptian women aged 35[4]
and some equally astonishing figures on the number of divorced women aged 35
who had never remarried. But then in that same, highly independent and highly
respected newspaper, I read an unquestioned quote of a well-educated and
well-connected woman. She, in the context of an increasing religious
conservatism (or “fashion” – did they call it “fashion” rather than
“conservatism”) discussion, said that ninety or ninety-five percent of Egyptian
women were now wearing the veil – which was certainly off the mark by forty or
fifty percent – an Egyptian proclivity for exaggeration that I am coming to
appreciate a bit more as time goes on. It’s as if people are surprised if you
don’t exaggerate when making a point… as if one isn’t doing a very good job of
it.

So maybe not all the women without head scarves in Pyramids
are Christian. And if their husbands’ wedding rings are gold, that is the
clincher. Muslim men wear no gold. Just silver. But it remains a good rule of
thumb. Probably my wife never went around without a head scarf before 1967. She
grew up amongst observant Muslims in an Upper Egypt city where she would have
worn a headscarf from her early teens or so. But like the legions of poorly
censused professional women of 35 years of age today who have never married,
she hadn’t married by that age either and never did until she married me.

This was all turning over in my mind as we walked mile after
mile in the sprawling suqs of Ataba the other day, looking for a sewing machine
and buying clothes. She picked up a few largish pieces of fabric that she said
were to become ponchos. I began to notice only about three months ago that
she’s the only woman I know or see on the streets who wears ponchos. Hippie
chick or something.

I asked her wonderful cousin, Assim, who introduced us most
of two years ago, what it would have been like for her to go to work for
Telecom with her electrical engineering certificate when she was young. “Forty
years ago?” he said. “They would have put her in the lowest job and kept her
there.” When we got married we rented an apartment near an area telephone
exchange that she’s assigned to so she could walk to work. She was punctually
out the door and on her way to work at 7:45 am on every working day until June
of last year.

Then one June day she came home with one of the phone
company’s health care purchase orders. Fifty percent of Egyptians are said to
have employment-based or other private health cover. Upon the advice of Yanks, I
imagine. One wouldn’t want, for instance, to be giving national health
insurance to one’s unemployed youth – or would one?

Egyptian economic statistics are quoted with greater
precision than social statistics (e.g., never married 35 year old women estimates)
and I have assumed that the “50%” with health insurance that I read about is
roughly accurate. So Reda (“warm satisfaction” – a both male and female given
name) showed me, last June, a Telecom purchase order with the normal list of
arthritis and other medications. But there was also a line that said
“Cataracts” which I had never seen on the forms before… a condition she had
never mentioned at all. She asked me to take her to the eye hospital the next
day and I said, “Sure,” assuming it was for a referral or check-up.

Off we went on the motorcycle – I got it four or five months
after coming back from Australia in 2008. Twenty-nine months and twenty-nine
thousand kilometers on the mean streets of Cairo. But it turned out that Reda
wasn’t at the hospital for a check-up. She was there for the first of two
cataract removal operations that would have her on sick-leave through the next
45 days or more. It kind of took the wind out of her sails with respect to
enthusiasm for her job. With only six or eight months left until retirement
after her time off for the cataract operations, she began taking more sick days
for less convincing reasons and was sent home without pay one day owing to her
late arrival that morning – which was becoming routine.

So she is well and truly ready for retirement and I’m
drifting into a routine of doing native English speaker copy editing for a few
Egyptian and Saudi Arabian translation services – work I get through their
to-ing and fro-ing email of all information and documents to my home. I will be
able to service those accounts from any place in the world with Internet
connections once Reda retires and we will start traveling.

Reda had no brothers and had never married before. Meaning
she, as an Egyptian women of her age, has never traveled abroad for lack of
suitable escorts. So we will be seeing the rest of the Middle East in coming
years. We think nothing of it. Fatherstake their sons to church and mosque and teach them right from wrong.
The murder rates in Cairo and other Middle Eastern cities are as low as in
Tokyo and Amsterdam. Except when people bring terror to those they think would
collaborate with Apartheid Israel and its guarantor – The Failed States of
America. The tears of Baba Shenouda. Any Christian becomes a target. My memory
of Christmas 2010.

I would have peppered this piece with more facts and better
spellings about Danish American Lutherans, American Christians and Jews (do you
follow Forward – a lovely, highly regarded American Jewish newspaper?),
Israel (do you follow Haaretz – a lovely, highly regarded Israeli Jewish
newspaper?), and Egyptian Muslims and Christians. But the Internet was down
through the night.

Following on the heels of the Tunisian Revolution of recent
weeks, Egyptian young people have been doing what they can to shut down traffic
in central Cairo for several days (10 or 12 kilometers away on the other side
of the Nile). A big push was being organized for today again, after a
relatively quiet day yesterday, and since all this is organized over Facebook,
etc., the authorities have shut down the Internet and cell phones altogether. I
will email this missive when email becomes available again, as is. Written from
memory and from the heart.

Egyptian birth rates are getting well lower than in the past
but of course youth unemployment has to do with birth rates fifteen and
twenty-five years ago and they were still very high at the time. So many young
people without higher education or without useful higher education are without
work or, at least, without well-paying work. And they’ve been busy for a day or
two trying to shut down central Cairo road traffic. Even 40 and 50 years ago
when President Gamal Abdel Nasser was asked what worried him most, his reply
was “3000 new Egyptians a day.” It is perhaps more like 4500-5500 new Egyptians
born every day now and something like 3500-4500 young Egyptians, on average,
coming onto the job market every day.

We were up all night, napping off and on, watching the
developments downtown on TV. The Friday noon prayers were called some moments
ago and I’m sitting at my desk at home where I can hear the sermon from the
large nearby mosque’s outdoor loudspeakers. Reda just now came into the room,
curious that I hadn’t left for mosque. But I told her there was trouble
downtown and it was better that the Egyptians go to the mosque, listen to the
sermon and talk it over afterwards without any foreigners.

Egyptians ask me about my past and why I retired here and
why I became Muslim. I’m fond of pointing out to them that I grew up in a
Lutheran church. There no book or person told me that Muslims were going to
hell or that there would be any way of knowing who was going to heaven and who
was going to hell. And that since I imagine I will one day die in Egypt, I
wanted to do so praying with them because their life here is so wonderful. They
find that quite astonishing. “Come on down.” They’re anxious to meet you.

The summer is too hot for all but the most intrepid visitor
(but you get very good price). October and November are nice as are March,
April and May. And December, January and February are also lovely (if you bring
your long johns).

Addenda - 2 February 2011 13:11

So we’ve got our Internet connections back.

I’ve been wondering if you’ve been watching the news of
Egypt these last many days.

Tell me the Egyptian people aren’t magnificent!

Tell me these young people aren’t pretty!

Tell me Obama doesn’t now have all the ammunition he needs
to fire Hillary Rodham Clinton and the American Israeli Public Affairs Committee!

Tell me Obama shouldn’t be listening instead to that
wonderful ex-US Senator Mike somebody who spoke on our TVs from San Francisco
on about 31 January!

Tell me America wasn’t blindsided by the “rights” approach
while it poured more trillions into the military approach!

Tell me Enok didn’t show us how to open our eyes without
telling us what we would see!

Tell me these gorgeous Egyptian young people didn’t learn a
lot from studying the non-violence of the American civil rights movement!

Tell me the Egyptian upper classes and their children
weren’t taught what democracy is supposed to look like at their beloved
American University in Cairo!

Tell me the Egyptian lower classes weren’t taught what
democracy is supposed to look like in public schools that use American
models of civics!

Tell me this isn’t the beginning of the END
for Halliburton and the military-industrial “complex” General Eisenhower warned
us about!

2.5 days lost trying to get the password (which only(?)
Assim could get – but Mr Monsour did)

0.5 days setting up new ADSL modem

2.5 days trying to get the WiFi working

1.0 days waiting for neighborhood EEs to come look at it who
suggested LE450 modem

0.5 days of panic thinking the problem would never be solved

0.5 days real panic as it first occurred to me that
old modem may have been OK and it might have just been the power supply (and
praying no one had taken it out of the trash and figured out my mistake)

1.0 day home sick in bed

1.0 days trying again but using an old Chinese laptop to
test what I was doing (the old laptop not able to hold on to a signal, anyway)
– partial victory in the end when someone on the far side of the hotel got a
good signal but couldn’t log in – reprogrammed a little and went home, not
knowing if that last burst of activity had any useful result

1.0 days trying to switch home and hotel modems (we don’t
use WiFi at home but it has good WiFi functionality) – end of the day Ahmad
Salah, the evening shift manager, told me the same story as Mr. Monsour (which
I assumed was a misunderstanding) that Ahmad’s laptop was able to hook up
through WiFi at a good high speed – but hotel modem was at home which meant it
would all spill into another day – ISP network goes down.

1.0 days with the home modem back at home and waiting for
ISP functionality and then configuring back to settings for home – five or ten
minutes hooking the hotel modem up again at the hotel – worked instantly –
wrecked the rest of the afternoon fooling around with “access points” that I
was mucking up because I had forgotten how. Rearranged access points (little
boxes with antenna) to put the one with the biggest antenna directly above the
reception area, next floor up, where it also spilt nicely into the dining room
– finding old modem in computer room (someone had rescued it from the trash –
took it home – power supply tested function – unit was not functioning)

1.5 hours lost getting home as there were pro-Tunisian sorts
of demonstrations all along my normal routes and we were detoured all over the
place by the riot police.

Today’s notes concern a strapping young steer who had an
unfortunate experience. He got eaten.

My neighbor’s middle son at the flat I own, Ahmed Magdy Selim, is kind of a
self-made man who I have mentioned before and there are perhaps some hundreds
of thousands like him in Pyramids. This young bloke went to government schools
and then did accounting at Cairo University, working part time as a house
painter, and has just now, at the age of about 26 or 27, been promoted to chief
or other upper level supervisor of reservation personnel or something like that
after only three years at the Intercontinental Semiramis mega hotel on the Nile
downtown. He, at least, seems on his way to being a little bit rich.

When he finished a Berlitz intensive business English course after his accounting
BA and military service four years ago, I took him on a bit of a hike to meet
Assim. We found him at the used furniture store he, at the time, owned and
operated evenings close to his home in Faisal. Assim talked to Ahmed quietly
and a bit privately and the few words spoken that I understood suggested that
Assim was asking about Ahmed’s education. After some further lounging in front
of a cup of tea at the furniture store, Ahmed and I started out on the long
walk back to Tersa/Omda (the nearest well-known cross-street on Tersa).

“He hired me,” Ahmed gasped as soon as we were out of
earshot from the furniture store. “He hired me to help with the
bookkeeping and the evening shift.”

So that was that. I went back to Australia a few short days
later and received nothing but reports of love and admiration in Assim’s emails
about Ahmed and Ahmed’s emails about Assim for the two years I was back in Australia.
And it was the two of them together who picked me up at the airport almost
exactly two years later when I came back for good.

It’s fun to watch over time as I hang around and do a little
work at the hotel... Assim’s kind of well-known for training and then launching
young people on to bigger things. A great mentor, we would say in English. A
bit of a sheikh to the young people who received their start in life from him.

By the time I left to go back to Australia in 2006 I was content with the flat
I had bought and content that I would work, live and die with my friends in
those neighborhoods when I retired from full-time employment in linguistics in
2008. I’d never really dropped my anchor before.

I decided by about 2007 back in Australia that I would also die praying with
them and told Assim and Ahmed in phone calls that I wanted to go to mosque and
declare my faith upon getting back to Egypt.

They wasted no time when I returned, April 2008, and the first day I was first
looking well rested after returning they explained that Assim would take me to
a particular sheikh/pastor and that another man would be there as well.

It was the sheikh from that first night at mosque, Sheikh Asfor (“Sparrow”),
who came to my sister-in-law Zuba’s house two or three evenings ago... two or
perhaps three days after she “sacrificed” a cow in honor of my marriage to Reda
eight months ago.

I’ve been a great disappointment to Sheikh Asfor as I will mention presently.

As Assim now tells the story, Zuba told Assim, after he had
introduced Reda and myself to each other, “I’m gonna kill a cow if she marries
this guy (“sacrifice” – no precise English equivalent of an Arabic word that
seems to imply either “kill” or “sacrifice” [“sacrifice” animals as in the Old
Testament – they actually then consumed the animals as Jewish and Muslim people
do today]). I promise to God I will kill a cow.” Assim was glad to let the
comment be forgotten for a time but he has recently begun to tell me that story
saying that he has been recalling it more and more to Zuba… “You can’t promise
to God to do that and then not do it…”[here]

So the cow story started some days ago with a two or three km motorcycle ride
from Reda’s sister’s house up to where the farms start in northwest Pyramids/Faisal
directly west of Dokki (and then extend north and beyond 26 July Corridor and then
into the Delta). Not far at all from Reda and Zuba’s building – there are vast
agricultural lands there still being cultivated. The city now surrounds that huge
part of the Nile’s west bank farms, which is on the Nile flood plain. The east
bank, Cairo proper, has a bit of elevation and was the earlier city in its
entirety. As mentioned before, the west bank flood plain only became available
for residential use after the Aswan Dam was finished and that area quit
flooding every spring.

At the southwestern edge of that remaining farm land, Reda paid for the cow
under the date palms with money Zuba had given her and then we slowly putt-putt-putted
back to Zuba’s place, one of the Upper Egypt kind of guys who sold us the cow
walking along behind us in his galabea, leading the cow, followed by another
motorcycle putt-putt-putting along with two butchers in galabea on it bringing
up the rear. The “cow” was a two year old steer which looked very clean and
healthy. They slaughtered it in their apartment building’s entrance/foyer
because there was a drain on the floor for the blood.

When I got back some hours later, Reda and Zuba were finished with the
butchering which they had done in an apartment in their building they are
renovation after the men slaughtered, skinned, gutted and quartered the cow
downstairs and brought the pieces up to them. They had it all in a big pile of black
plastic bags of perhaps 5-10 kilos next to a gleaming white pile of bones.

Zuba gave me perhaps 10 kilos to take to “my” family (Ahmed Magdy’s parents,
specifically). Reda and Zuba then distributed much of the rest around Zuba’s neighborhood
over the next day or two, the biggest bags to the poorest families, and Reda
and I brought armloads, perhaps 25 kilos, home for ourselves which went into
the freezer with perhaps 3 kilos for our building’s doorman.

Sheikh Asfor came to Zuba’s place a few nights ago to do what imam’s do when
someone sacrifices a cow. I went to his mosque many Fridays immediately after
my conversion. But that soon came into competition with an equally conservative
mosque very near my little flat where I was living (while Sheikh Asfor’s mosque
was more like a 4 or 5 km hike through the streets of our neighborhoods).

A mosque near my flat took an interest in me once they noticed I was wandering
off for the noon prayers in galabea every Friday at about 11 am. I was visited
at home by three men, one of them a locally famous sheikh who has spent most of
the last 20 years in Los Angeles with a growing mega-mosque. Actually someone
came up from Magdy’s flat who said there were some men at Magdy’s house who
would like to talk to me – and I went down to see what it was all about). Sheikh
Mahdy speaks an unaccented American English and told me in a friendly,
welcoming way that the men with him would help me get started in reading the
Koran at a nearby mosque.

So it was Sheikh Mahdy at my brother Magdy’s house. Surely I
will think of tongue twister with which to tell future versions of the story.

Sheikh Mahdy’s invitation soon became rather more appealing than Sheikh Asfor’s
mosque because that small mosque – very small mosque – which Sheikh Mahdy
directed me to is very close to my house – very close – and doesn’t pray Gomah
(“1. the Friday midday prayer; 2. Friday”). Like many of the small mosques on
our streets over around Tersa/Omda, everybody goes to a certain large mosque on
the main street, Tersa, for Gomah. There the “Dr.” imam speaks rather softly
for about 20 or 30 minutes while Sheikh Asfor always speaks for an hour and a
bit… in a great bellowing voice over a loud PA system... to a good-sized
gathering I might add. Very popular with Upper Egypt migrants. Of course I
never understood anything of what either one of them was saying in their
sermons so I was glad for a shorter walk to a shorter talk. I wore galabea to
the Tersa Street mosque for a while. But it didn’t seem to be the most common
thing to do so I then usually didn’t unless I was just feeling kind of happy
and wanted to go to mosque as Muslims did 1,000 years ago and more, wearing
galabea and sandals, my eyeglasses and wristwatch left at home and nothing in
my pockets but my house key and prayer beads.

By the end of a year and a month back in Egypt, almost precisely, I got my first
flat with Reda in Dobat. Here I go to a large mosque on the other side of the
school from our flat. People at that mosque are pleasantly oblivious to me, as
they were at the big mosque on Tersa Street, except that one or two people a
month may walk up when they notice me somewhere in the neighborhood, and
introduce themselves, saying they’ve seen me at mosque, and welcoming me since
I seem to be new. They don’t necessarily assume that I am a foreigner. They just
occasionally and pleasantly welcome anyone new to a mosque. An Egyptian might
be a white, white Europoid (although very, very few have anything but jet black
hair unless they are Syrian) or a black, black African.

I had learned by the time we married and moved out here that neither Sheikh
Asfor’s mosque nor the small mosque I was directed to in my old neighborhood by
Sheikh Mahdy are highly regarded by the main of the larger community. And...
surprise, surprise, surprise... certain members of the one small “Sunna” mosque
even made disparaging comments about the other.

There is mild disdain towards those Upper Egypt people who
cling to their rural ways on the part of older Pyramids families and there is
the same resentment towards fundamentalists in general that so many of us have
in America and Australia. Jesus will come back if we help Israel steal more
land from the Palestinians (America and even a bit of that in Australia). The
rich people who don’t want to pay for my ten kids’ education will burn in hell
(Egypt). But it means something to Assim and Tarek to attend Sheikh Asfor’s
mosque so we talk about Islam quite often and I don’t say anything about Sheikh
Asfor’s presumed disappoint with me.

And of course the fundamentalists are delightful when you meet them
individually.

So there we sat the other night, Sheikh Asfor and myself, at
opposite ends of my sister-in-law’s dining table on the day they butchered the
steer, kind of lightly sparing with each other... a glance and a frown on his
part, a glance and a smile on mine. The Keeper of the True Religion and the
Comfortably Less Than Pious.

He had arrived with 5 other men on three motorcycles, the youngest about 20,
the oldest about his age... 40 or so.

I had declined an offer, from the youngest, of a miswaak (sticks the size of a
toothbrush, the blunt ends of which they use to ritually clean the teeth). He
kept trying to give it to me after prayers at Reda’s mosque (the one she and
her sister built into the first floor of their apartment house). I just didn’t
want it and I especially didn’t want him to think I was interested in all their
many overt acts of piety. Prayers were done, we were still kneeling where we
had prayed and I refused it three times and then got up and moved to another
part of the mosque when he poked it at me a fourth time. The Palestinians are
not going to get their state etc. if I use miswaak. Which is, essentially, what
fundamentalists of this type believe. Like Jerry Falwell, who came flying out
the door September 11 and blamed the attacks on American homosexuals and
others, Egyptians became more religiously conservative after the 1967 war
because they believe God would not have let Israel win if they, the Egyptians,
had been living right. Women, for instance, started wearing head scarves again…
and still do.

So afterwards we were sitting at the dinner table, Sheikh Asfor “harumphff-ing”
slightly whenever our eyes met, the 40-ish guy with the biggest zabibah (see Wikipedia) glowering
at me again and again until my amused smiles made him give up, the young bloke
a bit upset until he saw by my constant smiles that I wasn’t mad at him.
Neither Asfor nor any of the others tried to converse with me as they speak no
English that I know of and perhaps assumed that since I wasn’t taking an
interest in the True Religion I also was not learning any Arabic. Or maybe I’m
on their “to be shunned list”, though I don’t know. They’re generally friendly
towards us in the neighborhoods when Reda and I are out and about. Anyway, I
kept my peace and just kind of enjoyed the situation and did not, at Sheikh
Asfor’s table, try to converse.

I don’t remember anything else of consequence from that night except that after
the meal Asfor had each of the other five go into all the rooms of the house
and then, as if at the mosques around the neighborhoods, sing out the call to
prayer, the Adhan, loudly at slightly different starting moments. They were all
experienced muezzin, their calls filled the house and it was really quite
thunderous and pleasant to all of us to hear.

Assim, Reda’s nephew Mahmoud and I then walked the six of them down the five flights
of stairs to the three meter wide street and they climbed onto their three
motorcycles (in their galabeas). I had been saying “Shokrun” again and again as
we went down the stairs and then poured out onto the street. Then as they
started to pull away I called out good and loud, over the rather quiet
motorcycle noises, “Shokrun tani! Miraati mabsuuta awi!” (“Thank you again! My
wife is very happy!”). They exploded in embarrassed laughter. I don’t know why.
Perhaps they then assumed I had understood everything they had been saying
through the evening.

So that’s the report from Pyramids of a Saturday evening. I only found out a
week or ten days ago that the spacious, gardened clubs of the rich keep lists
of people offering native speakers’ English tutorials and that patrons of those
clubs are used to paying $30 an hour for these services. So tonight I’ll be
getting the names and phone numbers of these places on the Giza side of the
Nile gathered together off the internet and start calling them tomorrow. A
couple I previously knew of already have my details. I have a copyediting
application in limbo with an Arabic language newspaper that is working towards
launching an English edition (which they have already done in Beta ~
provisionally on the internet). The editor in chief says she can’t get the
business office to cut loose with the funds for my position at the moment and I
know independently that they are behind schedule on the launch of their English
hardcopy version whose advertising revenue and the eventual addition of
advertising to the web version being, one would guess, the source of funds for
the copyediting position. But I have a little income from work at Assim’s
hotel... and more if I want it. And my first pension check arrived a few weeks
ago from one of my old trucking companies in America. So we’re some months away
from crisis mode, financially, and Reda’s cheerfully frugal in the meantime.

Actually, there has been only one. And it was an $8 ticket. Which I could have
paid on the spot (and left with my driver’s license). But I didn’t have $8 with
me (flat tires are only $4 for tube replacement and I think I had $5 or some
similarly 27 February 2010 – a moving experience

Whew. We just spent the day moving (from Apt 54 to Apt 44 in
the same building).

We’re done for the night and fairly well brain dead. The apartments are
identical so by the time we got about half done I kept having trouble
remembering if I was supposed to be taking stuff out or bringing more stuff in
as I wandered back and forth with armloads of things. Kept going downstairs
instead of upstairs when leaving 44 as well (one can only go down from 54 and I
was walking out of 44 on autopilot or something). Lots of small differences,
mostly negative. This flat only has one electrical outlet per room except for
the kitchen. No fly screens in this one, either, so we’ll have to do something
about that. The main breeze comes from the French doors and it isn’t easy to
add fly screens to them if they weren’t built that way in the first place. I
don’t quite know what we will do.

It didn’t rain at all the first year I was back but we had a real hot week from
about ten days ago and then it turned cold again and it rained and hailed and
the wind blew like crazy last night. And we’ve had rain several days already
this winter. And me... the motorcyclist. It didn’t rain once last year and only
two or three times the year before.

The English language newspapers that wanted to hire me couldn’t get their
financial offices to cut loose with a budget to do so but then someone helped
me look into tutoring intermediate school students and also adult business
conversation people.

By two or three weeks ago I found I was having trouble getting on English
tutoring lists at some of the “shooting clubs” and expensive “international”
(rich people) English schools because I don’t have a Teaching English as a
Second Language certificate. I found out I could do a correspondence course for
$200 or $300 but wasn’t that keen to be teaching or tutoring as I have very
little teaching experience and no tutoring experience at all.

So I let my fingers do the walking and found out there are 36, I think,
translation services in the Yellow Pages for greater Cairo. Not wanting to blow
all my leads at once I emailed five with a resume/brief about the kind of work
I was looking for – seeking to do “A native English speaker’s final light
editing”. They all gave me work and one of them has me all day, every day. I’m
condensing Charles Dickens novels to an upper intermediate, early high school
English as a second language level (when there is nothing else to do). And it
is also the closest translation service to home so that’s been a great bonus.

And then, thanks to Google, the Dutch embassy found my home page (which doesn’t
say “Israel Stinks” anymore) and they are now preparing a contract for me to do
about 10 hours of work at $38 an hour... their suggestion of a reasonable
price, not mine. So, all up, it looks like we’ll have a car and be saving for a
house (apt.) by the end of summer or so. I’ve only had two employers, really,
in the last 20 years, Linguistics – RSPAS – ANU and an Omaha trucking company,
so I’m not used to seeking work. I didn’t know where to start but it all came
good.

We took a two year lease on our new place upon Reda expressing her desire to do
so. She wants to spend 15 April 2011, the day she mandatorily retires, until
about two years from now looking for a place to buy. We’re happy in the burbs
for the moment but we miss the barrios where everything is just out the door
and life on the street is so invigorating. No idea what we’ll do. The newer developments
and even the 20 or 40 year old development we live in aren’t half full and even
when they do eventually fill up, they just don’t have the density for the neighborhood
markets and street life we both miss out here.

I starting writing these notes a few nights after I met Reda
10 months ago saying, retrospectively in a preface I added at a later date:

“Within 30 years, Delta and Upper Egypt migrants and their descendants will
account for some large portion of Cairo’s peoples, a status they hold even
today. But in 30 years they will be Cairo’s pre-eminent constituency.”

Learning more since about the demographics – 20 million live in Cairo, 20
million live in Upper Egypt and, my goodness, 40 million live in the Delta....
over half of Cairo’s 15% annual population growth is due to young singles and
families arriving from Upper Egypt and the Delta. I am told, literally, there
is no more water in the Nile to further expand farming in either place.[1]
Family size is down but youth unemployment is high because of much higher birth
rates 18 years ago and more. Not all these young people arriving to Cairo are
literate. There is often a ground floor room or couple rooms designed into
buildings where the doorman lives with his family... commonly illiterate Upper
Egypt men in their 30s and their wife and children. But their children do go to
school and so onward the generations march through time.

I thought for some months that both Reda’s parents were both from El Minya in
Upper Egypt but Reda’s father turns out to have been from Alexandria. So she’s
immediately related to people from the emerging constituencies of both Upper
Egypt and the Delta as well. And typical of how they intermarry in Cairo...
with each other or anyone else they feel leads an upright life. It’s twice the
fun for us. We’ve been to the farm in El Minya and will soon be in Alexandria
again where her cousins’ children are mostly in their 20s and have moderate
numbers of children to bounce on our knees.

A Reda story that I thought I’d tell tonight is about the night she lost
something off a toktok (tricycle motorcycle taxi - Latin
orthography “toktok” sounding more like “tuktuk” sometimes because there is no
difference in Arabic) after we were married but before she started riding
on the back of my motorcycle.

We were on our way home from visiting her sister and she had
armloads of plastic bags full of fruit and vegetables. We walked, me pushing
the bike, to the thoroughfare where she got on a tuktuk with all this stuff and
I got on the bike and followed along. About a kilometer away from her sister’s
place one of her plastic bags about the size of a deflated basketball fell out
of the tuktuk and I stopped and picked it up. It was wet and slimy and smelt
like the alcoholic who died in my apartment house in Copenhagen over one
Christmas. He had the heat turned up in the flat and his body wasn’t found for
a week or two. Another bag kind of flopped off the tuktuk and onto the street’s
sand and dust about 100 meters later and I shook my head and drove on. She was
dumping her sister’s kitchen rubbish.

What happens to it in that particular place, and through
much of Pyramids, is that Bedouin shepherds bring their sheep and goats through
the next day and all the organic stuff is removed as the herds forage through
the bags people have pitched since the herd was last there. Then self-employed
trash collectors come through looking, by individual specialization, for
cardboard or plastic bottles or empty tins. There are perhaps dozens of specialties.
Some just drive about on the carts calling out, “Bikiya” (second hand) and
dismantle things for parts or other recycling. They start very young when their
parents take them out of school to help. They know no other life or work and are,
perhaps, mostly illiterate. In this and other ways, over 80% of Cairo’s trash
is recycled... a testament to the government’s effective fostering of informal
solutions to things they don’t have a budget for and, also, a different kind of
testament to using a soft hand with urban or rural poor people who take their
children out of school to work. On the matter of Reda’s missiles onto the curb,
nothing is left but tens of millions of, mostly white and shredded, empty
plastic bags blowing through the neighborhoods like snow in a northern winter,
invisible to the eye of the residential beholder.

I was up to a friend’s place on the 10th floor of
one of the area’s grand new apartment buildings, standing on the balcony
smoking a cigarette, and called to my friend, saying that “a very wealthy man
is walking down the street.” He came to look and I pointed to the man leading a
flock of sheep down on the street. He laughed merrily and said, “Those sheep
belong to the man with the new car business” (around the corner). I had assumed
all were Bedouin doing well in the city.

We got moved into our new flat some days ago. Then just as we were sitting
around huffing and puffing from our exertions of the day, the old landlord
telephoned and asked us if we’d like to move back in to his flat again. His son
is still getting married but is being posted overseas so the flat isn’t
presently needed by his family after all. I don’t have time to move again due
to favorable volumes of business coming in for my native English speaker copy
editing work. Reda will moan for three months, her cousin Assim predicts,
because the rent in our new place is about $30 higher. But for a dollar a
day... I ain’t gonna move again. But I’ve designed the fly screens for our new
flat, which has none, and am going to buy the tools and put them in myself.
Reda’s endlessly intrigued that both my grandmothers grew up on farms and
attributes anything I can make or fix to those good influences.

“Badaghaz” (bottled and piped natural gas or perhaps, I am now wondering, the
name of the stove itself) hookup came 10 days or two weeks after we moved into
the new flat. So now Reda is again cooking the last of the cow parts she froze…
which I can no longer identify. But that’s a story previously told.

A week ago made right about fifteen months since I gave my carpenter LE4000
($800) towards an LE6000 project to do a major office desk and bookshelves
project for my own little flat that I then moved out of when Reda and I got
married and moved into another, and now another, place. The following is pasted
from a letter I drafted to the tourist police telling the story.

---------------
Submission to the Egyptian Tourist Police

Pyramids Monument Station

Pyramids, Giza Governate

by Jeffrey C. Marck

Egyptian Drivers License Number: 02070000472631

Australian Passport Number: M9223627

53 Abdullah El Bahar Street (via Omda)

Pyramids, Giza Governate

and

Apartment 44, Building 38

El Remaya City

Pyramids, Giza Governate

Sometime between the end of February and the end of March, 2009, I deposited
LE4000 with Mr. Ashraf for the construction of a large desk and office set for
my home on Abdullah El Bahar Street. The total cost was to be LE6000 and LE2000
would be due upon completion of the work.

But in April 2009 I was introduced to a woman, we decided to get married and
were married in May, moving into Building 38, El Remaya City.

The LE6000 project was to be custom built for a particular room in my Abdullah
El Bahar Street home. I went to Mr. Ashraf upon moving to El Remaya City.
Actually he was present when we signed the lease. I informed him that the
LE6000 project was too big for our new home. I then asked him to build a
smaller project. I asked if he could build it to about the same size as a LE3000
project he had done for me in about three months’ time the year before. With
him in the new house we measured the place the desk would go.

He had done nothing to start the LE6000 project so this was no inconvenience to
him. We agreed that he would build the LE3000 project and that he could keep
the other LE1000.

There was never any receipt from Mr. Ashraf nor any contract. There had been
none for the project the year before. But a mutual friend, Assim El Sersy, was
witness to conversations surrounding the two projects as they developed. He
witnessed these conversations at Mr. Ashraf’s shop, at my home, at Mr. Assim’s
hotel and other places we met. Mr. Ashraf came to my wedding. There were
various places we met and Mr. Assim talked with Mr. Ashraf and myself about the
nature of our agreements. I think we can expect that Mr. Assim will provide
evidence if Mr. Ashraf wishes to complain that I have said something untrue.

There is now a big problem. Mr. Ashraf did not start the project for about a
year. Various pieces of the project have now simply been lying around his shop
for several months, are becoming damaged and have never been completed. And now
Mr. Ashraf, and Mr. Assim saw Mr. Ashraf do this, has begun asking for an
additional LE1000 to complete the project.

---------------

I had the letter translated by Mr. Ibrahim who owns the translation service
I’ve been working with for some months now. He printed it on his company’s four
color letterhead, stamping the translation as certified with two different
kinds of stamps at the bottom. This was about ten days ago on a Thursday.

The translation service is two turns down side streets from a major U-turn
junction on Faisal Street and the carpenter’s shop is two turns down side
streets on the other side of the U. We generally wander away from the office at
about 4:15 pm (mine is thus a seven hour day which begins at about 9:15 am as I
wait until 9 am to leave our house, the traffic being quite wretched up to 9
and quite lovely immediately afterwards).

So upon leaving the office just after 4 pm a week ago last Thursday, I folded
the letter into thirds, put it in a nice envelope, put the envelope in my shirt
pocket and motorcycled to the U-turn in the median and across, going the wrong
way down the last 40 metres of Faisal Street, as cyclists do, and turned onto
the first side street. I didn’t have to turn down the second because Ashraf,
the carpenter, was at the falafel shop right where his shop’s side street
intersects with the main side street. He tried a bit of hail fellow, well met,
but I was immediately occupied with getting the bike turned around and pointed
back at Faisal Street, gave it a shot of gas, lurching towards him, slammed on
the brakes as I came up to him, pulled the letter out of my pocket, handed it
to him with a snarl, and blasted off, showering him with gravel from my
spinning rear tire.

He had been served.

This was 4:20 pm.

At 5:20 pm I was at home and there came a call from “General” somebody at
Ashraf’s shop.

“Aii-iiy-wa (Ye-e-ess)?” I said, unruffled. We rent our home from a general.
Our last landlord was a general. Our apartment building is full of generals.
The building super is a retired general. If Ashraf wanted me to talk to a
general, I guess I could get a few generals to talk to him. But better save
them for another day.

The general on the phone could apparently think of nothing
more to say and Assim, my old, old friend who owns the hotel and married me off
to his cousin Reda, came on the line and said, “Ashraf is saying to pick up
everything on Sunday.” I thanked him and Reda called Ashraf for me on that
Sunday to sus it out. It would be ready, “tomorrow” and “tomorrow” was the word
again the next day, Reda gaily conversing with him a bit extraneously each day
to sustain the fiction that it was a friendly phone call.

On Wednesday I drove by his place after work, passing the
shop and ignoring Ashraf’s beckoning me to stop and talk, making a U-turn about
20 meters down the street. The pieces of my desk and book shelves were all
completed and sitting against the buildings on both sides of the road. Probably
he didn’t have the money to send it all to the paint shop for lacquering or
whatever it is he usually does, and I called out to him as I drove back past
his shop that I would return after 10 pm with a truck.

Reda and I motorcycled back to that neighborhood at about 10 pm and started
looking for a truck. It’s the city that never sleeps. Trucks for hire
congregate at nearby bridge over the Mariotea canal nearby. Some were too big
for Ashraf’s side street, some were too small for the load, some were too
expensive, some drivers looked just a little bit crazy and on we went, Reda
bargaining at last for one that had a driver and an extra man.

When the deal was made there was then a long conversation about how to get to
the shop, when finally the men said, “Oh, Ashraf. We’ll see you there.”

Reda and I took some wrong way street shortcuts on the motorcycle to Ashraf’s
while the men made a legal trip with the truck, all of us arriving at the same
moment, as it turned out. It was all sweetness and light, we got the stuff
loaded, down the road and up the hill to our house, up four flights of stairs,
into the guest room/office and off to bed before midnight. I’ll stain and
varnish it myself, who knows when?

I’ve worked over 1000 hours, 1500 perhaps, at home with boxes stacked on each
other for a desk since giving Ashraf the LE4000 15 months ago. I didn’t really
want to go on for another 15 months checking twice a week to see if it was all
inching along or something.

The power of the press. Perhaps I shall write more letters
to the Pyramids Monument Tourist Police Station in the future... that I never
deliver to them. It was a sufficient threat this time around.

Well, my monthly charges at the bank went through yesterday without overdrawing
anything and I thought I’d give pen to certain... interested parties.

Yesterday also firmed up some new arrangements with a new customer for ATS
translation where I work. It is a customer I found. He had Googled for “native
English speaker copy editing Cairo” about six months ago, lining up his ducks
for services he would be needing as he prepared to crash into forming an Africa
infrastructure news service (for international construction companies,
technology companies, etc. wanting to know about government tenders around
Africa).

As it does today, or even Googling just “copy editing Cairo”, my website came
straight to the top six months ago. And also, “native English copy editing”,
for which I continue to be number one in the world. I’d be a little bit rich if
I could tell people how I did it but I don’t actually know why it is tops in the whole world. Anyway, it only
brings in about four or five large assignments a year.

Quite unexpectedly, I loved my Peoples of the Pacific Islands elective and
Introduction to Archaeology courses in about 1973. Between the two the whole
direction of my studies changed entirely. I struggled with the idea of leaving
African economic studies... leaving that “investment” behind... but it was a
particular repressed insight on a particular day at a particular hour at a
particular moment that burst out of my subconscious and calmly said, “The
Pacific is full of wonderful small peoples with wonderful small problems, with
a romantic prehistory and... besides... the population of Africa is going to
double twice by the end of the century and the economies will not.” It was
those precise words. I will never forget them.

I finally faced it. I simply didn’t want to watch those
unhappy African stories unfold for the next 40 years. And suddenly I was free.
I was gone. That’s the last moment that there was any inner conflict and
suddenly I was in graduate school studying language in prehistory in the
Pacific Islands.

I never lived in a huge city where my various lives keep
proving useful as they do presently.

I was on Saipan for some years when it hardly had an economy.

Then I was back in the American Midwest from the mid-1980s just in time for a
long recession.

Then I was in Australia just in time for “the recession Australia had to have”
but insulated from it by a large scholarship and certain university employment
in a different department.

Then I was back in America just in time to watch the neo-con bubble inching
towards the wreckage that would surely come. I saw it before in the Savings and
Loan excesses when they were neo-con deregulated in 1980s and wondered how it
was materially different than the subprime bubble – but the scale this time was
of an entirely different order.

But then there was Australia again and the dreamy grant Andrew Pawley and
Malcolm Ross had... finishing up things I hardly imagined 30 years before that
we would see completed in our lifetimes. It has taken and continues to take me
into a lot of studies on matrilineality... an unexpected result because few
MalayoPolynesian societies in the Pacific are still matrilineal... but they
were as they migrated into the area 3500 years ago (Hage 1998, Hage and Marck
2003, Marck 2008). Similar results for Bantu and other Niger-Congo speaking
prehistories in Africa: matrilineal migrants. I’m looking to get to Brussels
again and the Africa library there in the coming years.

Anyway, I was able to watch the neo-con wars, the neo-con economic implosion
and the neo-con oil spill from afar.

I’m in this vibrant economy – six percent annual growth again this year – that seems
set to give me the kind of retirement I imagined when I bought my little flat
here in 2005. Really hard work this year, but more like picking and choosing
next year, and more so the next, and the next...

People work hard here and life gets better, at least a little bit, for most
people most years and seems set to go on like that for a while. America was
influential in encouraging the economic liberalization that’s behind it. The
Yank government isn’t always wrong about everything Middle
Eastern. And when it is the Egyptians blame the American government for poor
leadership rather than the American people for poor followership. Still, few
people know I’m also American and I never bring it up in conversation. And it
is always my Australian passport that accompanies me to driver’s license
renewal, etc.

It was a stroke of luck when one of the young people in the neighborhood loaded
a copy of “Australia” (Nicole Kidman in the northern desert) onto my computer
and Reda and I watched it one night. “That’s Australia?” she asked. “Yes,” I
said without qualification. “When can we go?” she wanted to know.

Reda’s had cataract laser removals. Or I guess it’s ultrasound but here they
call it “lazer” in colloquial Egyptian. One about 40 days ago and one about 15
days ago. They turned out just great. The phone company seems to pay for
everything on their health plan. 50% of Egyptians have health insurance
somehow. I’d never have guessed that but now I’ve noticed that figure mentioned
in two reliable sources. And hers continues after retirement, Mr. Ibrahim tells
me.

She came home one day with a purchase order from her health
plan with a lot of medications on it and “cataracts” on one of those lines.
That was the first I heard about her cataracts. I only knew that she kept
rather bright lights on in the hallways at night. She said she’d like me to
take her to the hospital the next day. I assumed it was for a consultation but
it was for the surgery itself and we were there all day, me dozing off in the
waiting room and she getting quite upset about it as had the guys at the
motorcycle mechanic’s place the night before. I had been working 60-70 hour
weeks for a couple months by then and finally… I did it. I dozed off in public.
Twice. And really offended everybody.

Live and learn.

Anyway, she’s been off work all of the last 40 days or something and sleeps a
lot during the day and rattles around the house into the wee hours. So I do,
too. I knocked back to 35 hours a week before starting the English teaching
certificate work 5 or 6 days ago. I’d been running short on sleep for several
months and finally just really wasn’t sleeping at all. So I’m feeling a bit
refreshed these last many days.

Reda and I are both still just terrible about language and it’s still all kind
of pitiful baby talk between us. But there’s a lot of trust and joy and it
doesn’t seem to matter much to either of us. And when it does Google Translator
remains our faithful companion. We get a lot of mileage out of well-planned
jokes and surprises, too.

I come home to find her working on the English CDs for a week or so and then I
get into the Arabic CDs for a while but then she finally says, one day, “I don’t
remember any of this stuff,” and I say, “I don’t either,” and I guess
one just really doesn’t so much anymore at our age. But we find ourselves going
back to the CDs every few months and have another go at it. She has more and
more vocabulary coming back to her from rote memorization in secondary school.
I have the immersion advantage. We both have each other. We’re just kind of
happy and don’t care. And there is progress, however slow.

Mr. Ibrahim (BA English, Grad Dip Linguistics), his wife (BA English Education)
and Reda and I are planning out a book of Cairo Arabic verbs. The most common
ones. Which, as in any language, are the most irregular. It will force me to go
over it again and again and again. And this book of verbs will be designed to
get the user accustomed to the pronouns, prepositions, common juxtapositions of
people, places and things, etc. and not just the verb tenses etc. There isn’t
anything quite like what we’re planning on the shelves of the American
University in Cairo Bookstore and they routinely stock everything on Egyptian
Arabic so they’ll probably stock ours.

I’ve looked for lexicography projects since I got back in 2008 (that I might
volunteer on and similarly force myself into a book, again and again and again
going over the same material, even at the level of data entry and proofing) but
I’ve met most of the “real” (theoretical) linguists in town... there aren’t
many of us and we meet once a month on Saturdays... and no one knows of any dictionary
projects, etc.

Reda and I were up the Nile in El Minya overnight, leaving just after I got
home from work on Thursday.

I didn’t see the kind of activity on the floodplain, as we drove in yesterday
evening, that I saw this morning coming back.

As we drove the Nile floodplain on its main roads coming back late this morning
in the Peugeot 504 station wagon bush taxi with six other passengers and the
driver, I saw some hundreds and hundreds of men by ones and twos on donkey
wagons but mostly by twos on small motorcycles hauling their little
petrol-powered irrigation pumps and sort of nine to eighteen foot, 6 or nine
inch diameter pump hoses to the fields. The taxi driver was just great...
always slightly under the speed limit and taking every kind of sensible
precaution with oncoming traffic, etc. I relaxed and enjoyed the sights.

Some significant portion of water use is unregulated at the level of the
individual farmer. If you have land and there’s a canal running by... you can
pump from it. But of course the canals are thousands of years in the planning
and making and it’s all pretty logical, according to the engineering
assessments, of how to make water available to the whole floodplain...
districts thereof, actually.

What is now regulated is the making of new farms fields, as I understand it.
For millennia and millennia people just expanded the farms and canals as their
families grew. But now, as I’ve mentioned once or twice over the months, there
are at least some areas where the area as a whole is using its quota of water
running into its district’s canals, there can be no more water allocated to the
district, and no one can open up new land (i.e., prepare more floodplain for
irrigation) and one, especially, cannot pump onto land not registered as
irrigation land. But as a practical matter, I suppose they don’t extend the
canals into those areas, anyway. So it’s all pretty simple at that level and
these guys sort of burst out of their residential compounds and onto the roads
all at once as if police in cruisers coming onto the streets from their station
for their day’s shift. It made me wonder if there was a specific time they knew
that the water level of the canals would rise. They live in grander and lesser
villages and settlements and not in the middle of their individual fields like the
Yanks or Aussies... all off at 25 kph on motorcycles (always a second man to
carry the pump and hose) or donkey carts (often, or perhaps usually, with just
one man) to their fields outlying a few healthy kilometers away.

I wondered at the scale of the retail donkey cart business and where they are
manufactured. They have nice, sturdy springs and wheels as on light to
mid-weight family cars. They were all small wagons today that a single donkey
can pull when full. Somewhere they have larger two donkey carts but none were
in use for this morning’s purposes.

I wondered again if our driver would make ample adjustments for this traffic
but I needn’t have. He was once again a dream and assiduously kept his speed
down and gave a wide berth as we progressed through one vast expanse of fields
and its flurry of irrigation equipment transport, through village areas, and
then on through more fields and small equipment on the road.

It’s as flat as south central Manitoba and Minnesota/Northern Iowa. It’s the
height of summer and all the floodplain was green with one thing or another
unless something had just been harvested and was only stubble. There were no
bundles of fodder from these cuttings laying around as one might imagine a neighbor
or perhaps more distant districtman might be glad to liberate anything left
overnight.

I saw grape fields close up for the first time. Or took good notice for the
first time because they were bearing fruit and I finally knew what they were.
They grow the plants in little bushes of about three feet in height and
diameter... no climbing sticks or wires for vines, no nothing that I saw... and
we’ve been having the lovely purple and white fruits for what seems like months
now. I think they were 80 to 110 American cents a kilogram this year, the white
ones less, and the purple ones more, where I didn’t know what they cost last
year... I just never noticed because they were so cheap. They were half the price
and less 5 years ago, I remember clearly. But now perhaps they are said to have
gone more onto the international markets and doubled in price due to export
competition/pressures.

It’s not currency inflation that’s driving those particular prices up. The
Egyptian pound is steadily, year after, year... right at 5.4-5.7 per American
dollar. Australia’s currency exchange rates fluctuate with the Egyptian pound,
but only when the Australian currency is having its own ups and downs. Over any
appreciable period of time the Aussie dollar comes back to 90 US cents and 5.0
Egyptian pounds.

So, this stuff is kind of rolling through my mind, the grape prices, the end of
farm expansions, and, more personally, the recent increase of cigarette prices
by 40 cents a pack because they finally started taxing them in the past month
or so. They cut back petrol subsidies a bit at the same time, I’m told. A lot
of second hand information and guesses perhaps. I didn’t notice.... driving the
motorcycle and buying whole guinea (pound, LE) amounts of “benzene” so I can
pay and depart instead of waiting for them to come back with change. I just
heard about this but don’t know if I’ll be able to take notice and make sense
of it next time I get fuel. I can never remember what, in a sense, the
unvarying price was before. It was 1.75 guineas a liter for one octane level
but I never noticed if that was the one I always got or not. One price was
always around 1.75 and the others were always some odder number I never
committed to memory. So, previously, it was about 1.25 a gallon, American and
35 cents a litre, Australian... the 1.75 guinea per liter stuff.

The road rose eventually where the floodplain and its farms ended and we rose
not fifty or one hundred feet to a kind of low plateau or former floodplain of
undulating, very low rises. I first, as we came towards the edge, noticed six
very tall, thin smokestacks sticking up out of nowhere over the edge of the
rise where the floodplain ended. I had noticed these for the first time yesterday
evening and wondered what they were. It occurred to me in El Menya that Reda
and I were communicating well enough now that I could ask her what they were
and I did so as they came into view on the way back. First I saw four so I was
trying to get her to focus on the number four and that there were four things I
wanted to know about standing up like fingers on the horizon, holding four
fingers up very straight and still. But by that time there were eight or ten so
we had to have another go. Then, all at the same moment, she realized what I
was asking about and a broad graveyard came into view with five or ten of the
smokestacks seeming to stand in the midst of the graveyard and I made a faint
noise of comprehension, thinking for an instant that they were smokestacks of
crematoriums, smoke belching out of every third or fourth stack of a Friday
morning. But then the small size of the surrounding population occurred to me,
dozens more of these smokestacks were appearing to the right and to the left.
And I then realized that I had never heard of Muslims cremating, and I was
uttering a little noise of deflation and misunderstanding just in time to
rescue myself from the opinion of the other occupants of the taxi. My little
noise started just an instant before their little groans over my initial
misperception. No. Muslims never cremate, I was told, eventually, after asking
Assim when we got back home.

They turned out to be the smoke stacks of brick kilns which I saw as our aspect
rose a moment later and then there was some further elevation that exposed kilometers
and kilometers of them right at the edge of dry side up from the floodplain,
desert edge, Reda gaily noting that I figured out what they were, with some
helpful pointing on her part. There they obviously had the best of both worlds.
A clay kind of substance to mine from the surfaces of the low hills and valleys
right at the edge of the floodplain’s high water table. I didn’t see any
surface water pipes at all and wondered if they mustn’t simply drill shallow
wells down to the porous soil of the water table.

I wondered what hundreds and hundreds of trucks it might take to haul all their
industry to Cairo, just as we had seen hundreds and hundreds of “big trucks”
(semis/lorries) waiting to be loaded with fruit and vegetables along the larger
canals where there are always substantial paved roads. I’d not seen anything
like those hundreds of trucks out in the fields since trucking, myself, into
and out of the American West Coast and Southwest desert “truck farms”.

Then came a beautiful sight. “Cairo” was only “140 km” away and our home was
about 15 km before Tahrir Square in Cairo proper, to which the signs always
refer. The drive was now through the desert where it is cheaper and more
convenient to build a superhighway and there would be only a few tiny villages
and too many, really, sparkling but empty modern petrol stations. We were
dropped off with the Pyramids to our right and our home up the hill on the left
and walked home. Which was a great deal easier than catching these taxis and
nice passenger vans to El Menya. They’re always full by the time they get to
our part of town. They muster 15 km deeper into the city so when we left
yesterday we first had to city-bus 15 km in the wrong direction.

We had been talking about going to El Menya for a couple weeks because this
week was the first anniversary of Reda and Zuba’s sister’s daughter’s death (a 40
year-old) after many years of battling Hepatitis C. Even in Australia, that
battle is rarely won. Or such was recently so.

But then there could be no further delay, because, tragedies of tragedies, the
very woman’s 45 year-old sister and her husband were killed in a motoring
accident. Almost a year to the very day after the other one had died. We went
to Zuba’s house before we left where she gave us money and other gifts for
their sister whose only two daughters were now dead.

We went straight to El Menya and straight to the sister’s house where I soon
passed out in the bed they made available to us. I hadn’t expected the trip
until the next day and had worked all night on my teaching certificate the
night before. When I woke up this morning it was with the knowledge that Reda
had not come to bed all night and when I went out into the lounge room she, the
dead women’s mother, and her son, Khalid, were right where I had left them 12
hours before. They had talked all night and they all looked just terrible. Reda
was ready to go. She was too disheartened to come up for the funeral the day
before and didn’t tell me until we were suddenly leaving yesterday, why we now had
to go. The rows of funeral chairs were stilled filled by men yesterday evening
when we arrived.

Khalid had told me last night that his sister and her husband had been driving,
the car rolled into an irrigation canal upside down, and they had both died
there. He sadly walked us to the main road this forenoon and took us to one of
the utes/pickup trucks in the settlement’s main street on the other side of the
canal, the ute driving us, and picking up more people along the way, to the
mustering point for the Peugeots and passenger vans to Cairo.

We didn’t talk about family business in the Peugeot but as we walked up the
hill to our home on the Giza Plateau after getting out of the taxi, she
explained that there were four children. Three are in university and will stay
there. The fourth is Mohamed who I met last night at his grandmother’s house.
There it was explained to me that he was the youngest child of the deceased
couple, was still in secondary school, and would now live with the grandmother
(where he will be innocent, obedient, industrious and loved).

Reda had about just enough energy to feed me, tell me those further details of
the situation, and no more. She went to bed and I went off to the mechanic near
my old neighborhood to see about getting my oil changed but he was too busy
until tomorrow. So I went off to find Assim to see about further details of the
deaths and to talk about a few other situations I might clear up with him.

Assim expressed his anger with the dead couple. All their anger. The mother, the
aunts, the surviving brothers. All of them. “They didn’t have to leave us like
that. They should of been more careful. God knows!” What they specifically
believe is that God knows, for all the eons ahead of us, what people there will
be, what, minutely, they will do of their own free will, and what will happen
to them in every detail just as he knows all such things for all the people who
have come before us and those of us alive today. We will have our own successes
and failings, they will, in the main, be of our own free will, but God knows
what they will be and where they will lead us from even before the time we are
born.

Assim was able to tell me a bit more than Khalid did last night. Khalid teaches
French and also speaks wonderful English but I didn’t want to sort of sit there
and grill him about the death of his second sister in a year. Assim had been
talking to Zuba the last two days and the crash was a single vehicle event on a
deserted road. Perhaps veering to avoid a stray cow or something... they
overturned... and slid into the canal upside down. Did they drown or were they
already dead? Why would I ask? Why would he spontaneously say? I didn’t and he
didn’t. I don’t even know if it was day or night.

There were happier things to talk about. I had decided to work with adult
business English conversation students for my $30 an hour when I get my TEFL
certificate in coming weeks (5 or 10 I’d say). People in the industry say this
is a sensible and possible full time aspiration. Mr. Ibrahim at the translation
service has a 12 year old daughter, Nada, who has been coming to the office
twice a week and I have been tutoring her. Practicing my TEFL lessons on her.
And I know enough, generally as a linguist and in the evidence of my self-taught
foster daughter, Iva, that if you can catch kids and work on their hearing
of a new language, the benefits in terms of their pronunciations of the
new language just kind of naturally flow with small amounts of coaching and
exercises. But this natural ability quickly fades from about 13 on up. Except
in Iva, who went off to New York City for some months recently at the age of 30
and came back to Australia talking like a Yank. Yes, Ivancica! I noticed. How rude
of me to mention it now....

So, I’m learning how fast 12 year olds grab on to good instruction, how quickly
they pick up the specific new sounds of the target language, and how quickly
they forget if I don’t have the right kind of exercises to send home with them.
So Assim’s daughter, Maria (Mariam) is also 12 this summer but a bit further
along to begin with and it is now that I want to bring her in on these twice a
week sessions with Nada. Well, she just about died and went to heaven when she
heard this and then there was the question of how to show her where the office
is. I would come at 11 am Tuesday and take her on the motorcycle, or we could
take the bus or we could take a taxi (just the once). Maria said she wanted to
go on the bus. But her mother said, “Take her on the motorcycle. She’s afraid
to do it. Make her do it.” ( It was all very gay and after Maria and I
exchanged mobile numbers I went home, Reda was still sleeping, and I worked on www.AmericansInCairo.org, (a web site I maintained but would eventually abandon) and then turned to this missive at about dawn.

I had told Assim about midnight that I couldn’t teach his older kids... he had
asked about that, too... because I have to specialize and that I’m going to
have the two: adult business conversation and children under 13 who need
tutoring or small group work in hearing and pronouncing English correctly. I
told him, “I have to get serious. I have to be making $20,000 within a year.
Reda retires in a year and gets a lot of free doctors, and operations and
medicine. People say it will still be free after she retires. Is that really
true?” (This all comes with her phone company employment).

“Yes,” he said. “But the Ministers have been telling President Mubarak that
there isn’t enough money. And he told them, ‘We can’t stop doing these
things for the people.’ And the Ministers told him, ‘We can’t go on
doing all these things for the people.”‘

Assim is very grateful that I never want to talk about
domestic politics. And I sincerely don’t want to. I never said “boo” about
Australian domestic politics or foreign affairs until I was a citizen and, in
the same way here in Egypt, I am a grateful guest of this nation as I was in
Australia and even then I never got involved in politics after citizenship
except in the area of Palestinian rights (and Israeli wrongs). But there are
times, such as this night, when I need to know what’s going on and Assim has
the most eloquent way of distilling it into the folk knowledge of the moment
and I always accept it without a word except, “Thank you.”

It’s well past dawn and Reda was up at 7 and left to take a bus to a (free, for
the moment?) doctor’s appointment having to do with persistent colon problems. “I’ll
take you on the bike,” I said. “I don’t understand this colon problem at all. I
want to come along and talk to the doctor.”

“I’ll get the doctor to write you a letter.”

“Hmph,” I said, lying essentially, and secretly glad for the chance to now
sleep all morning. The doctors at the phone company’s clinics don’t like the
husbands coming along. And Reda probably took one look at me and knew I’d fall
asleep there, repeating my previous offences aAs I mentioned some weeks or
months ago, falling asleep at the motorcycle mechanic’s shop one Sunday after a
long weekend of overtime into the wee hours. They’re all still upset.
Though less so every time I see them. Egyptians can get very completely
indignant and do hold on to it a bit. But they are also completely forgiving,
or at least completely forgetting, of all my faux pas so far... given a
little time.

There are reasons to rejoice, these days.

For all of Cairo right down to just about every single person I know.

The price rises and ratcheting down of subsidies comes at a
time when most of Cairo is sharing in Egypt’s 6.5-7.5% growth (and more) for
the last many years and last year and this year as well.

It’s the first time I’ve missed an American or Australian
recession in 40 years.

The US/EU neo-con recession hasn’t caused any har dship here. One of the most
significant effects came most of two years ago when computer components fell in
price by over 2/3. Every teenager in Cairo seems to know how to build a
computer. But this fall in components prices meant that, in Cairo, a new
computer, with completely new parts fell from about $600 to about $120. The
only people who suffered were the internet cafes because by the end of six
months or a year of the new, low prices so many households had computers that
their members were no longer filling up the internet cafes.

Which is huge to families with teenagers in school that need lots of computer
hours to muscle up their skills for the job market. And the major appliance
megastores are all packed from the moment they open to the moment they close – this
is Cairo and, yes, one occasionally exaggerates... but I think that helps paint
the picture. Things are terribly upbeat and I especially take notice of
the closest major appliance store whenever I drive past it and indeed, it is
simply packed with people all the time.

Another measure is what must be tens or hundreds of
thousands of wonderful $500 150cc Chinese motorcycles in Cairo, the rural areas
and small (upper) Nile and Delta cities. Just like mine… these bikes. Mine has
23,000 km on it in 23 and a half months and has cost me $2.10 Yank a day over
those months, an extra 79 cents a day if I were to depreciate the whole thing
in one fell swoop. The modern world, computers and motorcycles, have come to them.
They won’t all have to come to Cairo and Alexandria to find them or earn
the money for such things. They’ve taken a lot of the money the Yanks give them
and have world class farm to market roads, rural electrification and sewerage
systems.

The young people who want to buy my little flat were
thoroughly befuddled and then embarrassed when their “deal” with a bank “for
the first week in June” turned out to be only an offer to look seriously at the
application once the woman achieved the current-job-longevity-requirement in
the first week of June. So the first week of July they finally fessed up and
said they were having problems they didn’t understand.

“No worries!” I said (lit.: “No problem.”). “In Australia we apply to five or
six banks and they all say the same thing. Either they all say, ‘Yes’, or they
all say, ‘No.’ If they all say, ‘Yes,’ then we take their offers to a good
accountant who can read their offers and tell us which one is giving us the
cheapest deal with the least hassles and potential problems.”

“But isn’t that sneaky?” they asked.

“Noooo, it’s like buying a new car. They expect you to. You go to five
different places who have the same new car and see who gives you the lowest
price. It’s just like buying a new car. They expect you to shop
around.”

So every couple of days since then I get a merry call from them at yet another
bank where they are being treated courteously and the loan officers are glad
for the application etc., etc. It’s been such a great lift because I’ve really
been suffering for them, not to mention myself and my creditors. Other
potential buyers are appearing in the wings and the young couple will accept
this as all that can be done at this point in their financial lives if all the
banks decline. I specifically want to sell to them because then the whole
building will be owned by one family again, “my” family, who can parlée it into... well that’s another story.

So now I will leave off by slapping in a few paragraphs that haven’t found a
home in these missives previously. It’s about “residence”. And the subject at the
moment, has, indeed, been residence. Therefore:

“I married Ma’adi. We live in Ma’adi.”

I heard this said in Cairo in 2005. It was a 30ish man replying to the question
of where he and his wife had made their home upon marriage, she being from Ma’adi.

This was some weeks or months after I was looking for a flat to buy and my new
acquaintance, also 30ish man, mentioned that their flat was near his wife’s
parents and that it was part of the neighborhood into which I was buying, if I
was happy with the area he would show me, and the “house”, as flats are called
in Cairo English, that he knew to be for sale. He and his wife of similar age
were expecting their first child and they were happy to think that the young
woman’s mother and two sisters were nearby.

Of course these kinds of stories occur in a wider society where the male
prerogatives, concerning residence, are essentially absolute. A normative kind
of statement that can be made is that the wife, when living with her husband’s
family, seeks to isolate her husband’s resources from his family that surrounds
them, seeking for herself, her children and her parents and extended
family all that she can in the face of constant small pressures from his
family. I guess that same normative statement can be made when they don’t live anywhere
near the husband’s family, but of course when they do it is all amplified.

There are accommodations of various sorts. Two brothers in their mid and late
20s married two sisters in their early and mid 20s and took them to live in the
men’s father’s apartment building. I have watched the young ladies become each
other’s partners in microscopic passive resistance conspiracies and they are
endlessly glad for each other’s company. Some small group of men, perhaps two
or three, was discussing the young men’s circumstances with me one night and
there was a certain question of resource distribution in the air in that
patriarchal homestead.

“Well, what are their wives thinking of all this?” one asked, because it
involved an element of competition between the young men.

“Their wives are sisters,” I said.

“What?” a second asked. Neither he nor the first speaker seemed to expect me to
know of such patterns.

“Their wives are sisters,” I said.

“Well....” they both sighed, much astonished. “Then there’s no problem,” one of
them said, completing the thought both had begun to speak.

Just guessing at the time, whoever won the father’s favor would then be under
pressure from his wife to receive some share, she would divert some of the resulting
resources to her sister, who would present them to her husband, ameliorating
her husband’s hurt at not winning the prize outright. In fact, I wondered if
the father wouldn’t transfer the resources concerned to the son who would play
all this out the most elegantly... which he… eventually… did.

Outright matrilocality – which, for Cairo purposes, I would define as renting
or buying in the bride’s mother’s building or neighborhood (bride’s father’s
building or neighborhood if still alive and still cohabiting with the bride’s
mother) – is common enough that one young engaged couple’s residence was
undecided and the subject of some gossip in an office I visit occasionally. “It’s
a crazy man who makes his wife live somewhere she doesn’t want to,” I said lazily.
As the office was entirely friends of the bride, one of the eldest men looked a
bit ruffled and then said, “Yes, but we can’t say that.”

And my talk was cheap. I have no relatives in Cairo and we would, just
naturally, as we have done, live nearest my wife’s family as do most men who
have migrated here and marry women with local extended families. Convenient to
her place of employment, in our case, but not inconvenient to her family or
even “mine” on short motorcycle hops. Which is similar to another kind of
success story for the bride: the groom marries the girl next door. Then she’s
in heaven. Her mother will be right there.

It’s 1:30 am and Reda just called the landlord, one “General
Sami”, to arrange payment of the rent for tomorrow some time. I was amazed and
mentioned that I don’t call people after 9 pm at all unless it’s someone I know
who turns off their phone when they’re sleeping.

“No one’s asleep this early on a Friday night during Ramadan,” she said, taking
my hand and walking us out to the balcony. There she swept her arm grandly
across the panorama of the immediate neighborhood and indeed the lights of
every lounge room and most of the other rooms were shining where all but two or
three are normally off by this time of night.

“There’s no light in that one,” I said, pointing to the
single flat that wasn’t lit up.

“They’re not home yet,” she said.

Perhaps our memory of Ramadan this year will always return first to a really
wonderful evening Assim had for us at his hotel with his oldest brother, Ahmed,
and his wife – who I had never met before.

Ahmed’s 15 years older than Assim and, technically, it would have been him
watching over the brother-less and divorced (Zuba) and maiden (Reda) female
cousins all these decades in Cairo (their mothers were sisters from El Menya) –
but Ahmed was away those many years with an illustrious career in the Gulf… all
his kids got PhDs, etc. And then there was a sister of Ahmed and Assim at that
big Ramadan meal, a medical doctor, who I wasn’t seated close to and didn’t get
a chance to converse with much. But the star of the evening was Reda because
something amusing had happened at our house that Assim exploited for the
occasion.

It was just a few nights before that Zuba had telephoned. She no longer tries
to boss me around but I occasionally remind her of the days when she did… by
teasing her... which is what slowly made her give up trying to tell me what to
do all the time after Reda and I first got married.

If the home phone rings at 3 am, I know it’s Zuba so when the call came I
thought I’d do what I might do to rile her and picked it up, myself:

“Mish mawguta.” (Reda had arrived to the phone and was watching, amused that I
would mislead Zuba).

“Ley?” cried Zuba. (‘Why?’ – the only answer would be the hospital or something
– Reda’s always either here or at Zuba’s at 3 am).

But the answer was:

“Fii ręęgil tani.” (‘There’s another man.’) Reda’s face lit up in delight and
she started pulling her right hand across her throat as if holding a knife and
cutting her throat.

“Eh?” Zuba said, shocked and mystified.

“Fii ręęgil tani.”

“Eh?” Zuba cried loudly.

Now Reda was just flatly laughing, and reaching out to take the phone. A little
revenge against the sister who had authority over her for decades?

“La’a, aana kizęęb,” (‘No, I was lying.’) I said before Reda got the phone away
from me with her left hand, still making slicing motions across her throat with
her right.

After the phone call Reda picked up right where it had started and told me
quite happily and excitedly that now her family had to cut her throat.

Without knowing it, I had said the magic words. I attempted to convey Reda’s
amusement to Tarek, the great composer, a few days later. But he simply froze
as I said the specific words I had spoken. Suspended animation. I attempted to
continue with the story but, he was so disappointed that I knew those words
that decided I’d best act like I hadn’t spoken them and changed the subject.
There is a particular phrase in Polynesian languages and another in
Micronesian, both ancient we think, going back to the time of Christ and
before, having to do with men sneaking around at night with their girlfriends.
Young men would run from my office, screaming with laughter, to hear them
spoken (and the old and the proper are mortified to discover that a foreigner
knows them – I had seen Tarek’s sort of suspended animation when an Islander or
reacted, crestfallen, to my knowledge of such things in Egypt or the Pacific
Islands).

When I next saw Assim, I mentioned the phone call. He was instantly amused but
attempted a frown, saying:

“You can’t say that!!! Now Zuba has to tell us all!!! And we have to make an
investigation and ask everybody in the family to swear what they know!!!”

He let it go at that and since he was amused rather than concerned I let it go
as well.

But the inquisition did come. It was on the day of the Ramadan feast at his
hotel that I began this story with.

It was in a guest room perhaps 7 meters by 7 meters. The one my sister, Jana,
stayed in, come to think of it.

Tables from the dining room had been brought in for the meal and I had been
seated next to Ahmed, Assim’s (much) older brother, and we had some interesting
chats in English during the course of the meal.

Everybody finished eating and we were spreading around the room a bit. To the
couch along one wall. Pulling our chairs away from the table. Ahmed’s large
wife laying down on the double bed with Assim’s 10 and 12 year old daughters
sitting on the other side of the bed.

Eventually, there was a lull in all the conversations all at once and Assim,
stood up, taking a central position in the room, saying, as he swept his arm
widely around the room until his hand was pointing at me, something like,
“Huuwa olti, ‘Fii ręęgil tani.’” (“He says, ‘There’s another man.’”)

The slouching young girls’ spines went straight as arrows and their eyes went
huge as they looked at Reda and then Ahmed’s wife and then their mother, Hanan,
as the latter two exploded wildly in utter mirth.

Reda was instantly beaming demurely and squirming in her chair like a naughty
school girl caught out about something.

The inquisition was on.

Assim formally and loudly called to the various blood relatives in the room,
one by one, asking if they knew anything about this while I chirped out
again and again that I had been lying and Ahmed and Assim’s wives (and Assim’s
sister, el doctora) laughed on and on, wiping tears from their eyes,
Reda beaming happily and making a motion of a knife slicing across her throat
every time our eyes met, the little girls incredulous and only gradually
understanding the accusation and that it was a joke. They sat through it all,
each with all eight small fingers her mouth, which spread their mouths wide,
their teeth clenching down on their fingertips, their aspect darting from
person to person as Assim, and the others, one by one, spoke.

Goodness. Everybody was so amused… and Assim, surprise, surprise, the
great maestro of those moments, was finally mock mollified and sitting down…
the conversations from before picking up where they left off. A cherished
memory of the day for the family.

Twice since, I think, I’ve been talking on the mobile to Reda, catching up on
where to meet later and there was to be some delay at her end. Both times I said,
with a light inquisitional voice, “Mafish ręęgil tani?” (‘There’s no other man?’).
And twice the reaction of her and the people around me was the same. She
happily protesting that her family would get a knife and cut her throat if
there was anything like that going on. The people around me amused that I would
know that phrase and amused that I would play the jealous husband to my wife
(there were no children present). “Knife.” “Sikkiina.” Finally, perhaps, I
shall finally remember the word.

The next couple of times I stopped at their house, Assim’s
little daughters greeted me with speechlessness, eyes as big as the moon and
smiles as wide as when they had eight fingers in their mouths at the hotel
dinner. I didn’t known it was possible for the mouth to stretch that wide
unassisted.

Otherwise there are these nascent language services accounts from the rich side
of town that my ATS boss once didn’t want me to have on a freelance basis (but
now finds some of them bringing in not just native English speaker copy editing
work but then translation of the completed work into Arabic – which pays him
more than other aspects of the total job pays me). Not a great change in income
but I have to kind of put on the brakes and make sure these new clients are
getting taken care of properly before I go out and look for more. Sometimes two
at once want something done overnight. My rates are low with the understanding
that they will rise to the going rate by about this time next year.

Otherwise, still, I’ve been drafting grant proposals to get some of the Pacific
Island’s most productive breadfruit to tropical Africa (the present Pacific
Island breadfruit in Africa comes from the time of Captain Bligh, his crew’s
mutiny to some extent due to the pregnant girlfriends they had on Tahiti after
six months of carousing while waiting for the right time of the year to prepare
breadfruit cuttings for the West Indies [and transferred to West Africa in the
1840s]). What is now being shipped produces two or three times the Tahitian variety
of tree already there.

The world’s great Breadfruit Institute (in Hawai’i) turned
all their Africa contacts over to me because with the American recession they
have neither the resources to help write grant proposals nor do they know
enough about Africa to be of help in all the necessary areas. So I’ve learned a
lot quickly about the science of breadfruit and have found it fairly easy to
get NGOs in Ghana started on applications as 1) I did an African rural
economies BA and visited Ghana in 1971 and 2) I lived with breadfruit
cultivation for 10 years in the Pacific Islands.

Diane Ragone (rah-goh-neh), the Breadfruit Institute’s founder and director
writes overnight that US-AID might fund African initiatives (we missed, 31
July, the deadline for the Australian grant that would have been most
appropriate as we were just, at the time, first pulling information together).
She’s to go to the mainland and meet with them in DC. And I’m her guy in
Africa.

I don’t think they need my participation on any of the grants’ actual
activities though I help quite a bit with the bona fides of the African
groups. So I’ll just be staying here growing my language services accounts.

Still, quite an honor to be helping the Diane
Ragone... and the African NGOs. I’ll always be the guy who emailed or
telephoned out of the blue... the guy with the magic wand.

Samoa has licensed the genetic material to Diane and Diane has licensed that genetic
material to Global Breadfruit (Cultivaris) and they clone, in layman’s
language, and produce as many tens of thousands of “germs”, I think they call
them, as one wants, and raise them up to 6 inch plants with nice little root
balls. At $10 each, FOB Germany. We’ll probably be speaking of 500-1000 plants
in the Ghana proposal (as much as $50,000 all up – $5000-$10,000 for the
plants, ~$5000 in shipment costs, and then 3-6 months of central nursery care
before they are made available to farmers).

Thousands of islands over thousands year. And rare incidents
in prehistory that one of the crossbreeds resulted in super-producing seedless
varieties. And there are some Micronesian super-producing varieties. The most
bountiful breadfruit in the world. They out-produce the present African
varieties 2 to 1 and 3 to 1. They even out produce Belgium by dryweight when
comparing to grains and Belgium is the largest producer per hectare in the
world. Two varieties are shipped that fruit at complementary times of the year
– good for people who want to eat every day. Good for factories that want
product every day.

Prehistorically, the Samoan varieties concerned were,
perhaps, the source of or a destination for the breadfruit I was around in
Micronesia. I didn’t know there was any breadfruit in the world that
out-produces certain Micronesian varieties. Western Polynesia and Central and
Eastern Micronesia kind of stayed in touch after they were settled two and
three thousand years ago so I assume the best from the one place would sometimes
have made it to the other. I’ll find out over time.

This first grant that the Breadfruit Institute will write a
letter of support for goes to Ghana. It will test my ability to find NGOs that,
in turn, have or find agricultural stations where plant survival is most likely
to be up around 100%, as it was among Global Breadfruit’s first of its kind
shipment in history to Jamaica – where it is the national food and where the
shipment perhaps arrived to some fanfare. The second shipment went to Honduras
and was apparently met with suspicion by agricultural inspection teams at the
airport who delayed the release a number of days and there was significant
plant mortality. And there are no “valorization” issues in Ghana. Breadfruit
saved tens and tens of thousands of people, hundreds of thousands, perhaps,
from starvation or aid dependence in the 1983-1984 famine when all their other
crops failed and their Tahitian variety breadfruit trees kept producing.

Well the Muslims are celebrating Eid (‘festivity’ – there is only this one a
year plus the Eid that ends Ramadan) and the Yanks are all set to celebrate
Thanksgiving... the national starting gun for Christmas shopping.

Interesting work keeps coming in and I am transitioning to those in fits and
starts with the security of my children’s books production activities for which
hours are available to me any time I want to do some of that work.

slim surplus). So they kept my divers license and told me
where I could pick it up for $10. So "within a week" I had paid it
off at a facility that didn’t have long waiting lines, etc. But it was $20 – an
extra $12 for not paying on the spot. Not just an extra $2. And I didn’t have
it. I had the $10 and the standard don’t-go-anywhere-without-$5-for-a-flat-tire.
But some guy standing at the next window paying some dozens and dozens of slips
for a trucking company pulled $10 off the top of his LE50(=$11) stack that
looked about 9 inches high... and I was off and on my way.

The motorcycle continues to be an enormous source of convenience and continues
to cost about $2 a day – petrol, parts, service and licenses. And fortunately
none of my friends, rich or poor, have cars unless their work requires one.
Assim, Reda’s little-bit-rich cousin with the small downtown hotel doesn’t even
have one. Which is a great asset when Reda asks about when we might get one. I’d
say ‘Never. Lots of taxis are still cheaper than a car. And you don’t
have to park a taxi.’ Kind of moot points, though. We always take the most
dangerous-looking junky-looking bus before we take a taxi.

There has been one traffic ticket. It was an $8 ticket. Which I could have paid
on the spot (and left with my driver’s license). But I didn’t have $8 with me
(flat tires are only $4 for tube replacement and I think I had $5 or some
similarly slim surplus). So they kept my driver’s license and told me where I
could pick it up for $10. So "within a week" I had paid it off at a
facility that didn’t have long waiting lines, etc. But it was $20 – an extra
$12 for not paying on the spot. Not just an extra $2. And I didn’t have it. I
had the $10 and the standard don’t-go-anywhere-without-$5-for-a-flat-tire. But
some guy standing at the next window paying some dozens and dozens of slips for
a trucking company pulled $10 off the top of his LE50(=$11) stack that looked to
be about 9 inches high... and I was off and on my way.

I was at the motorcycle mechanic tonight. I’ve been around there a bit lately
as the return spring for the brake pedals age and give out after a couple years
– those factory-fitted from a couple years ago. But there’s a massive supply of
poor replacement springs in town and the shops are just kind of replacing them
once a week until they are all gone or a better supply shows up or something.
Now there’s the same problem with the rear brake-shoe retractor springs. So
possibly I’ll be stopping by the mechanic 8 times a month instead of 4. Or
maybe they’ll just replace both at the same time once each week for the
duration.

I was sitting in one of the chairs at the mechanic’s place reflecting on such
things when my eyes drifted over to the interior wall on which his tools are
hung. He now has two of everything... spanners, screw drivers, socket
sets... everything. Not just one. For the two mechanics who now make
their living there... not just him. Life’s kind of doubled up for him in
similar ways. Two years and three months ago he had a few Vespas (‘fesba’) that
he rented out. But then people like me started showing up with these new
Chinese motorcycles he bought two, renting them out, then a third and a fourth
and perhaps now a fifth and a sixth. And since all that was doubling nicely he
got a 14 seat passenger vehicle and has personally started plying the highways
and byways of Greater Cairo – they don’t try different things every day,
although they may be free to do so. They run regular routes, experimenting a
bit with others, to see how they might keep their van loaded most of the day
for the highest price. So his young brother-in-law, who he has been the second
man for two years or more, is now running the shop and training others and so
on it goes.

Not so different than Assim who added the 6th floor of his building most of two
years ago where the hotel/hostel was just on the 7th floor for the first five
years he had it open. Double the fun. Double the income.

The property situation is perhaps well out of hand now but it hasn’t yet
crashed like it did in America and Dubai and when it does it will involve
speculative luxury villas and apartments rather than the apartments most of us
live in. Too many in the far west of Cairo and too many in the far east.
Perhaps tens of thousands of them empty. As is true of middle and low income
housing but those have the thronging millions coming of age or immigrating to
Cairo to keep that market rather better balanced out. Reda and I hope for our
savings to intersect with the luxury stuffs’ prices’ demise on a two to four
year basis.

Some of the sleepy old kinds of businesses are going under. But there are
abundant examples of the world of consumerism coming to Pyramids and finding a
hearty reception: Arab and American fast food, car dealerships, appliance
super-stores, computer shops.

Otherwise, I have become the Breadfruit Institute’s ‘lead man’ in Africa. Which
pays for nothing… except for the sins of my past. See link below:

06 January 2011 - Egyptian icebergs

Six or eight months ago – yes, June it was or perhaps May – I told Reda and
various friends that I would then most earnestly begin seeking freelance work
from area translation agencies to do native English copy editing and that it
might be the end of the year before it came to much good.

I had been working since March or April at the closest translation service to
our house. But southwest Pyramids is not the place to be looking for work
touching up Arabic to English projects. I don’t know if I’m the only
"European" living in Pyramids but at that agency it’s all English to
Arabic – equipment manuals, doctors’ reports – things at a personal or small
business level that brings the outside world to them. So my time at the
translation office has been spent exclusively – not almost exclusively –
precisely exclusively – condensing Dickens and Shakespeare for Egyptian
middle school students.

I have a pronounced astigmatism which wasn’t diagnosed until I was 35 years
old. Long afternoons reading on the beach etc. resulted in sick headaches up to
that time which was when I first got glasses of any kind including all through
my school days and through a BA and two MAs. Consequently. Before the diagnosis
and first pair of specs I had little interest in reading for pleasure or
purpose, but did so laboriously when circumstances required.

So, with three different kinds of reading glasses I started reading Dickens for
this guy in Faisal (Pyramid’s northwestern most district) in February and, to
me, it was thrilling. Dickens’ use of verbs not normally associated with the
action described so often created a good bit of inner laughter. Adjectives not
normally associated with the noun in question. Same thing.

The Dickens was just delightful.

But though it was "a far, far better thing than ever I have done", it
paid almost nothing so by about May I was looking for a polite way out and it
was handed to me on a silver platter by the translation service owner himself,
Mr. Ibrahim.

He went to Mecca in May, and made the minor pilgrimage which is the same as the
annual Haj except you get less "credit" for it... but can do it in
less crowded circumstances. It was also a bit of a business trip for him,
selling elementary level books for learning English. The Egyptian and Saudi
curricula are similar to some extent and Dickens and Shakespeare are a safe bet
in Egypt because such condensations are required reading in the public schools
and the private schools as well. So in a town of 20 million people you can do
what you like and try to sell it to the schools for their (4-6 million?)
students. It’s all out of copyright and Shakespeare, too, which isn’t actually
Shakespeare. Every last public and private school in town is required to have
their students read Charles and Mary Lamb’s 1810s prose summaries of some of
the dramatic works, simplified for middle school second language students.

Never was there one single copy editing job. By April I was looking for a
graceful way to branch out.

The opportunity came when Ibrahim didn’t pay me when he came back from Mecca
around the first of June. And he hadn’t paid the phone or DSL or light bill
before he left which were going out one by one and I had started staying home
to do my work for him.

"You can’t pay me?"

"Not yet."

"Assim just got back from Mecca, too. He took his whole family. He couldn’t
pay me either so he sold his car." Which was true but involved his 10 or
so employees at his hotel, not just me.

"You think I should sell my car?”

"Yes. I do. I’ve got to pay my rent and feed my wife."

He said no more and I left for the day. Whether it is some sort of special
license to all returning pilgrims or just him... I now had the excuse to go out
to look for freelance copy editing assignments from other translation outfits.
Ibrahim and certain others (partners in his school book operation) had insisted
that I not freelance when I came to work 7 hours a day for them. But there had
not been a single copy editing assignment which is what I applied for (its
higher pay, specifically).

So, with neither income from copy-editing, nor, especially, getting paid the
little they owed me on time, I let my fingers do the walking, found the three
or four next closest translation services, sent them CVs by email, and walked
in a few days later, a new one each day for several days,
next-to-cold-call-fashion. They were like Mr. Ibrahim. They were delighted to
meet me in person and all offered work as they had occasion to receive
appropriate commissions. I had seen this with Mr. Ibrahim and by about that
time I was beginning to understand what it was.

They had all seen the big commission slip out of their grasp
because they knew no native English speaker doing copy editing work. So that
was my entree to all these places. The big one that got away. They were all
just delightful, as was my current "employer" when I first met him.
But I was beginning to wonder by then what good it could do if they would then
advertise "native English speaker copy editing" as they all proposed
to do.

Look for yourself. Do it now. Google those words and yes, it is moi meme who is numero uno in the world, right below the two to five paid placement
outfits. And this was true at the time I was making these forays last June. It
took me two or three months from about February to move to the top. But it
results in very little business. Nor had it helped my initial potential
benefactor, Ibrahim of Faisal, to bring any new English copy editing work to
his west Faisal service. We both have services that report to us about visits to
our web sites and I, El Numero Uno de la Monde on Google, gets hardly any
visits at all and just five, as I recall, actually retained me (and all paid
when I was done, thank goodness).

Mr. Ibrahim’s web site visits are most predominantly from
people linking through upon finding him listed in the online Yellow Pages – which
has no dedicated "copy editing" category.

My breaks began to come from two men I hadn’t heard from much since visiting
them in June. One had a major corporation’s web site for me to copy edit some
time during the summer and thought he would give me a try. His client was quite
happy but no word from him came again until about October when he and another
agency started getting in touch quite a lot and then, too, a quite wonderful
man with an agency in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia started sending me editing and
proofing as well. I asked the gentleman from Jeddah how he found out about me
and it wasn’t my web site. It was someone he knew in Cairo, who he didn’t
mention by name, who knew of me somehow and that, perhaps, is the heart of the
story on how people seek such services as well – referrals from other clients.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, I had moved on to A Tale of Two Cities and it was
a joy to get paid to read it. Condensation ran much the same as with Oliver
Twist and David Copperfield – getting rid of 8 page adjectives etc. and just
leaving Dickens’ other magical words alone. A Tale of Two Cities was approached
as with the others but it was a shock to see we would need 1700 definitions in
the glossary when we ran the software to see what was in there (that is, 1700
words beyond the 2500 most frequently words seen in English late elementary
curricula). I think it was 400 or less for the others.

I’m not an educator and hadn’t really noticed the difference
but Dickens was using a whole different level of vocabulary in Tale of Two
Cities (Oliver Twist and David Copperfield were first serialized in newspapers
or magazines and only appeared as books afterward).

Then there was the Shakespeare work and Charles and Mary Lamb’s ~1810
"retelling" which was just that much different than Dicken’s English
of the 1830s to 1860s that it isn’t accessible in the same way. It had to be
heavily edited and then to-ing and fro-ing between using more glossary items,
getting rid of a lot of their words with modern synonyms when they are a bit
archaic. A tougher row to hoe than Dickens.

The work will always be there if I want it. And I do. I worked at Mr. Ibrahim’s
office 52 hours in October, 50 hours in November and 52 hours again in
December. I had a difficult master’s thesis to copy edit over the past eight
days. A guy in a certain regional government ministry who needed a formatter
and typesetter more than he needed a copy editor. So I haven’t seen Mr Ibrahim
for a week except when he called me to come collect my pay for December.

We had a good laugh late last month. His wife had their car and was at the
school where she teaches and the battery had gone flat. We went down there on
my motorcycle and between my on board motorcycle tools and some nicer stuff he
had in his car we started working on the situation. But then his daughter got
out of the car and closed the door and his wife’s keys were then locked inside.
So I scrambled over to his apartment on my motorcycle to get his car keys from
the baby-sitter and got back rather quickly. The rush hour was closing in on us
and we were all laughing as one thing we did and then another had no effect on
the stubborn starter.

Then I saw Ibrahim was some yards away on the main road
flagging down a three-wheeled taxi ("toktok" – from India) and
assumed he was off to buy a new battery. But then he and the toktok driver
drove straight to the car and Ibrahim pointed to the battery under the driver’s
seat of the toktok. It was the size of a car battery so for $1 we took out the
battery, hooked it up in his car, and the car started right away. The toktok
driver got his battery back in place and blasted off to make money in the rush
hour and we got the car’s old battery back in place and blasted off in our
different directions, laughing, to see if we could get to our destinations
before the rush hour had the streets backing up badly. We’re pals, now, I
guess.

Reda and I are still fairly pitiful when trying to speak the other’s language...
getting better glacially. Her more than me because her secondary school English
is coming back in bits and pieces. I’ve got my spoken Arabic CDs and she’s got
her spoken English CDs but we’re both about 60 and don’t retain much when rote
memorization is involved. We have better luck spending time sitting together
with the dictionaries working back and forth on vocabulary we want to know or
want the other to know. Spelling out the Arabic word with the Quranic
diacritics and, for the English, the symbols of the International Phonetics
Society helps me most in terms of memorizing and trying to pronounce words when
practicing them on my own without an Arabic speaker at hand.

So life involves a lot of good faith, a lot of Google translator and a lot of
jokes and surprises. The utter failure of tonight’s surprise is what inspired
me to sit down and write a small wedding missive.

The man on the ground floor who sells salted fat and sugar to the students from
the boys’ high school across the street had been cleaning up the empty shop
next to his sundries shop and suddenly, yesterday, the unit he had cleaned up
was filled with shelves and counters and display racks of fruit and vegetables.
And he seems to be set to stay open 24 hours a day as most fruit and vegetable
shops do. Which is great for a lot of reasons. 24 hour security for my
motorcycle which is locked to the lamp post 20 meters away, for one reason. And
something besides Borios (an Oreos copycat) for when I’m ready for a snack and
a walk – which might be at 3 am because some of my copy editing work involves
largish overnight jobs.

I noticed yesterday that he had iceberg lettuce which I had noticed at a very
few other produce markets though more so lately now that I think to look for
it. I had been feeling low in a not-enough-veggies way for a number of days and
it was like a dream come true to see this guy’s shop open up. And everything
is in season now, though less so for some fruits. The tomato crop has been
fabulous as well as for cucumbers, capsicum and a number of other things I like
but don’t know their names. And there’s too much of all of it. The tomatoes are
20 cents (AUS/US) a kilo, vine ripened, picked yesterday, etc. and about half
of it rots before it’s sold. Getting a little overripe in the farmers’ fields,
I guess. I can’t imagine how little the retailers are paying for them. The
trucks coming from the farms can be seen driving the neighborhoods begging the
retailers to take them.

The produce shops have a pleasant way of just piling one’s small bits of this
and that onto their scales and charging a "salad" price per kilo.
Today it all cost me $2.50 after adding a kilo of bananas to the salad stuff.
If I really want to make Reda feel she’s living a glorious life, I bring home
bananas, milk and sugar. But today it was all about salad and I contrived to be
in the kitchen chopping it all up as she came home from work. Well, she arrived
and just felt invaded. Big disaster. And she thought it was a plainly
crazy idea to be using iceberg lettuce for salad when everybody knows it’s for mashi (the rice wrapped in grape leaves
one sees at Lebanese restaurants and Arab weddings... grape leaves, iceberg
lettuce leaves, cabbage leaves, stuffed into small hollowed out eggplants – dozens
of ways to make mashi, perhaps).

So she fought the iceberg lettuce away from me, stuffed it into the
fridge, and then came over to the counter where I was cutting up the tomatoes
and started trying to grab the knife away from me because, as I understood her
to say, I obviously didn’t know how to cut tomatoes.

Egyptians will simply grab things from you or grab your arm and, with what
force they can muster, drag you away from something they don’t think you should
be doing. Well, I was not going to fight over a knife and came in here to the
office to write this instead.......

We’ve just had dinner this half hour later or more and there were tiny pieces
of iceberg lettuce in the salad. And they say contrition is puppy poop. Anyway,
she’s brightened up... which is what everybody says about her: "Kulliyom
mabsoota." (She’s always happy.)

We’re in a new flat again. This last general kicked us out early, too, saying
we had violated the lease by getting a land line telephone. And he only gave us
5 days to get out. I wondered aloud to my friends as to whether he had an adult
child who would be taking it or if there was someone offering to pay more.
"No," they all said. "Nobody wants you to put a phone in their
house. Or to get the electric or gas in your own name. Did it say in the lease ‘no
phone?’" "Yes, but why?" "Because some people will get
those things in their name and after 5 years go to the land office with the
receipts and say they bought the place but lost the papers. They never win
those cases. Or in some cases you can’t figure out who’s lying. But you can’t
touch them and it might take 5 years for you to get them out... all the time
getting no rent... all the time preventing you from selling it if that is what
you want to do... all the time wondering if the son or daughter you bought it
for is going to want to get married before you get rid of the other people. Nobody
wants you to get a phone in their house."

So here we are. Five weeks in our new place. Our concession to a legal system
that uses a soft hand when poor people or others make the aforementioned kinds
of claims. Many of them are illiterate but prove, in the end, that it was the landlord
who was trying to pull off a dirty trick. Actually our phone was never
associated with that flat’s address in the phone company records. It was a line
thrown down from the roof by people Reda works with at the phone company. But
it was a general telling us to go... so off we went. Up the hill in the same
"city of generals". Renting from a woman who bought the place from a
general years ago. Here the phone line already came down from the roof and
through the office window and there isn’t any "no phone" clause in
our present lease, anyway.

The move would have been a disheartening financial blow if not for this recent
blossoming of relations with the accounts that I developed last year. When we
decided not to take the general to court and simply move out as he was
demanding, we sat down to look at what our moving expenses would be. All up it
was going to be about $1000 which we didn’t have. The new landlady was going to
cut us some slack until January or something but that wasn’t the half of it.
But we just kept putting one foot ahead of the other and going through the
motions when two days later I got a large, short-time-schedule copywriting
project and then another and then another. I worked flat out at the computer
for five days while Reda field marshaled the house moving. My computer was the
last thing out the door and the first thing made serviceable at our new place
here. And the jobs I had by then finished paid $1100. $100 is huge money in
this part of town. Our "profit" from those days. $1100 in 5 days. But
it’s feast or famine. I probably won’t see that again for a while.

The flat is a mirror image of where we lived before. I was, for a lot of days,
walking out of the office and into the bedroom rather than taking a left
towards the kitchen and the coffee urn.

The snow storm in Jerusalem in the middle of December was a big howling sand
storm here. It took days to clean the house up. We were protected from strong
winds better in the previous flats but we’ll be glad for any smaller or larger
improvement in the breeze through the summer at the top of the hill here we are
now.

Reda makes the occasional comment of late about buying the place, but at the
same time gets excited every time she sees a banner advertising a vacant flat
on the bustling main street near the apartment building she built with her
sister. The air is much fresher here. The flats are bigger for less money.
There would be a place to park a car if we get one. But I do love the life in
town, too, and the new places going up on the empty lots in our old neighborhoods
all have basement car parks. We shall see what we shall see.

Reda’s got 96 days to retirement, she tells me. She acts like it and has ever
since her cataract surgeries in about June. Really took the wind out of her
sails. She takes a lot of sick days, now, that she maybe doesn’t need, and I
notice her office now has four desks instead of three and hers is no longer the
big oak desk for the manager of that unit to preside over (she got that job
only a year ago or so, "Yes," she said. "Madame Noor turned 60
and retired. And when I turn 60, I’m going to retire." She patted a small
pile of papers on her office desk that she was working on and said quite
happily, "We have to."

Ours is a Muslim marriage contract. There are no civil unions under Egyptian
law. One is married in church or mosque or synagogue and divorce (which the
main Christian denominations don’t allow) is also defined and implemented
according to the rules and practices of one’s faith. In a Muslim marriage
contract the man always signs up to "take responsibility" for the
woman "from" her family... her father or oldest male relative signing
her away. I’ve never asked about her income or what she does with it although I
suppose her nephew Mahmoud’s undergraduate tuition is a big part of the story.
Last year was just plain tough financially but whatever little bit I brought
home she made it last and allowed me the dignity of being the household’s sole
source of support.

She talked recently about wanting to continue to work somewhere after her
retirement from Telecom. Maybe she will. The nephew Mahmoud has another year at
the institute after this one. But I brought up to her a general vision of
traveling quite a lot. "We could be in Damascus for six months...
anywhere. My work comes by email. It doesn’t matter where we are." So that
was news to her. We’ll go to Mecca first. If we went anywhere else
outside Egypt first she would just want to be in Mecca anyway.

At the electronics and IT institute Mahmoud is fast learning to use the English
he was only taught to read K-12. And he’s settled down to studying and other
better priorities than a year (?) ago when he was demanding an expensive
motorcycle or car and just plainly couldn’t understand why his mother and Reda
wouldn’t buy him one. Danish kids start buying all their own clothes when they
are 14 and move into their own flat when they are 18. Which was also true of
the Yank-Danskers as I was growing up. Such questions of whether that is better
for the youth are moot. Young people don’t generally have any way to make
enough money to live independently here in Egypt.

I procured a 10-20 weeks Teaching English as a Foreign Language Internet course
in about June. A respected outfit and the certificate from that course would
have opened lots of doors. But – OH – sick headache. The course rather assumed
that one would either have other teaching experience or be prepared to
supplement, on a self-starter basis, one’s preparations through readings of
certain theory and practice of education stuff. I could see myself slowly
slipping behind on a 10 week schedule, then a 20 week schedule. I didn’t see
how I could get it done within the 6 month limit. I was 5 weeks into it and had
lost 5 kilos from stress (plus the 20 kg I lost, on purpose, when I came back
from Australia in 2008 – I was beginning to look like Uriah Heep). The 20 kilos
went by way of a lot of walking. Most of 10 km per day for 3 months. The 5
kilos in 5 weeks was from stress and loss of appetite from the course so I cut
bait.

But it all came good. I’d rather work at home doing the copy editing. The work
is very absorbing, time flies and I finish up, usually, the day I get the
assignment or the day after. I email it off and that’s it. I walk down to the
cafe and by the time I get there I can’t always remember the project’s topic,
even if it took several days. Don’t care. Don’t have to care. The client
agencies do all the marketing and billing. They pay within 30 days and before
that if I ask.

When I hear the phone beeping with a text message it’s almost always one of the
agencies as my friends are all too old to fuss with texting much and it’s a bit
of a thrill to hear the phone beeping upon the arrival of a new SMS.

My PhD thesis supervisors probably think it’s a big funny joke that I would be
copy editing anything. But I do it at a level that seems to strike a
comfortable place in the clients’ hearts. And I do. Yes, I do, feel like I’m in
a Bourne movie when a text message comes to me at a cafe and I have to blast
off on my motorcycle down desert roads to get to my computer and send a quote
off or, alternately, just sit down and do the job immediately because the
agency’s already promised a client that "their" guy would do so.

The motorcycle – 28,000 km on the mean streets of Cairo in 29 months. We are,
indeed, enjoying our second childhood together. We will go to the far side of
town tomorrow to look at sewing machines. But we will take buses and subways.
We won’t leave until after the noon prayer after which one has an hour or two
to drive around town quite easily but then we would be driving back 20-25 km
through full-on weekend traffic by the time we were done looking around the
markets. Not a place for the faint-hearted. We don’t even go to her sister’s
house 5 km away between 5 and 8 pm on work days. It’s not so much dangerous as
it is very slow going and hard on my hips to balance two on the bike when we
are at a standstill.

It’s the Coptic Christmas Eve tonight and we just finished watching the
midnight mass on TV. Pope Shenouda seemed to be wiping away tears, as well he
might. And the congregation looked gravely terrified. Perhaps 20 Christians
were murdered in a bombing outside an Alexandria cathedral as they left a New
Year’s Eve mass. I only heard about it a couple days ago. I finally had time to
get the TV set up with its dish that day and the first thing that came on was a
Middle Eastern Christian funeral with two or three caskets being passed over
people’s heads into a cathedral. The sound wasn’t working yet so I didn’t know
where it was. I had heard Christians were being bombed again and again in Iraq
in recent days but only yesterday came to know that the funeral I saw on TV was
more probably for some of the people in Alexandria.

If the God-damned Yank Congress and presidents would cry like this when Israel
cluster-bombed civilians in Lebanon and phosphorus-bombed civilians in Giza
maybe they would stop saying naughty-naughty to the Israelis and start telling
them to withdraw the settlements and fucking well behave themselves.

Europe is united. There the people believe that the biggest threat to world
peace is Israel. Except for the UK people who think the biggest threat to world
peace is America.

People no longer stand up when American ambassadors enter the room. Not in
Europe or the Middle East, anyway.

I just yesterday pushed the "Confirm" button on the Internet payment
that involved what I expect to be the last taxes I ever expect to pay to the
United States of America.

I shall never be helping to fund its violent adolescence on the world
stage again.

Why didn’t I know about the Alexandria bombings sooner? Because nobody even
talks about anything having to do with America and Israel. What
difference would it make? They don’t. I don’t. I’m glad to never give it any
thought at all... except upon seeing the tears of Baba Shenouda.

Egyptians wear long johns through the winter. They make all
the difference between enjoying Cairo at this time of year as opposed to often
wishing one were somewhere else. All my friends wear long johns. My wife wears
long johns. Her sister wears long johns. Our nephew wears long johns. Everybody
wears long johns. You don’t even have to ask.

I joined the legions and got some long johns for myself
towards the end of my first winter in Cairo in 2006, finally taking the
Egyptians’ advice a month or two before returning to Australia 15 April. I left
for Australia feeling like I had discovered an entirely different city. I no
longer got cold in the outdoor cafes in the evening when the breeze picked up a
little. I no longer shivered through the evening and early morning working
hours as I rattled around the house. People don’t heat their apartments in
Cairo. Not in Pyramids, anyway. We all wear long johns.

I’m not the first Des Moines Luther Memorial Church person
to have retired to Cairo. My parents’ great friends, Wilber and Cleo Williamson
wintered here, as I recall, more often than not after they retired. Or perhaps
it was somewhere else in Egypt and not Cairo.

As an undergraduate African economies student, I had been to
Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia in 1968 and first came to Egypt after West Africa,
East Africa, Ethiopia, Eritrea and Yemen in 1971.

I was a student in Enok Mortensen’s confirmation classes about
1962-1964. He was in Des Moines for a year or two, half time as pastor of
Luther Memorial, and half time gleaning bits of Danish American history from the archives of the Evangelical Danish Lutheran Church in
America Grand View College. I knew then that he was writing a history of
the Danish Lutheran church in America but it was only within the last year that
I learned of his many other books and I sent off for some of them.

Enok spoke to us briefly about something special one
Saturday morning, our small confirmation class meeting in the parsonage just
west of the Danish old people’s home, Valborg, and across the street from the
Grandview College women’s dormitory, although I don’t know what the latter is
now. He spoke to us of something he did when he was 17 or 18. He had come to
America with his family when he was 16. When he finished high school he got
himself to San Francisco, rode steerage to Japan and, from the Asian coast
somewhere, had taken the Trans-Siberian Railroad to Moscow at the height of the
Russian Revolution in 1917. He never said more about it than just those basic
facts. But it got my mind turning as to the things he might have seen and heard
when taking that route at that time and going onward to Denmark from Moscow. By
1968 when I finished high school I had also met Bob Shreck who went on to be a
famous cancer doctor in Des Moines. Bob’s tales of his Middle Eastern travels
when he was about 20 and I was about 15 also got me thinking I might do well to
go out and see a bit of the world.

I had come back to Cairo in 2005 to see if I might like to
retire here and I stayed the better part of a year. I was here in 2005 when Jyllens
Post published the Muhammad cartons. I saw the Danish products immediately
disappear from the supermarkets – yards and yards of empty dairy cases around
the neighborhood more or less immediately. I came back in 2008, retiring from
academics and getting on with my new life here. The Danish products had not
come back. Nor have they today. So neither can I comfortably tell people that
I’m American nor, since 2005, mention that my family was entirely Danish before
that. I had been living in Australia through the 1990s and have been a citizen
of Australia since 1999. So even before 2005 I had a more useful nationality to
mention than saying anything about America. Egyptians don’t often speak English
and when they do they don’t seem to notice differences in English dialects and
they commonly assume that I’m a native born Australian. I’m careful not to
disabuse them of that impression until they are aware that I am pro-Palestinian
and have been for a long time.

Ever since hitch-hiking from one Mediterranean youth hostel
to another in 1968, I had been witness to the common European opinion that
these settlements Israel was establishing in the Occupied Territories were a
cause for great concern. We young people in the youth hostels in 1968 swore
oaths to never visit Israel or buy Israeli products until the settlements were
abandoned, an oath from which I have never strayed. Charles de Gaulle, the
French President, had put it succinctly the year before: [Israel] is
organizing, on the territories which it has taken, an occupation which cannot
work without oppression, repression and expulsions… and if there appears
resistance to this, it will in turn be called “terrorism”. He was president
of a nation which had just seen over 100,000 people killed due to its colonial
project in Algeria – a project which France, in the end, had to abandon.

So there I was, late summer, 1968, properly concerned about
the settlements. But I was going home to where I had learned to swim at the
Jewish Community Center, had a very few classmates who were Jewish and had seen
a Jewish girl at our high school play Anne Frank most worthily some months before
in the drama club’s spring production. Enok had taken our confirmation class to
a synagogue the year he was in Des Moines. A pleasant rabbi spoke to us and
showed us around. My siblings and I were all aware of the Danes getting the
Jewish people of Denmark safely away to Sweden during the initial Nazi
occupation. I’ve had Jewish people point out to me that those Danish Jews had
to pay well for the help they received getting to Sweden… but so did one of my
mother’s cousins in Viborg when he went onto Nazi arrest lists after he and
another boy or two stole some of their troops’ rifles while their owners were
eating lunch.

From 1968 I’ve always had comfortable friendships with
Jewish people starting from that fall when I began university. I have never
felt it was difficult to separate Jewish rights and humanity from Israeli
government wrongs and inhumanity. I remember, especially, having lunch with
three Jewish people in Australia in the mid-1990s. There was an
Israeli-Australian who was glad to do long university years in Australia. One’s
time owed to Israeli military service was calculated according to how much time
one spent in Israel and how much time one spent in other nations where one had
citizenship or permanent residence. He was a lieutenant, I think, in the
Israeli army… and was called to service but little because he lived in Israel
but little. The second was a UK-Australian Jewish woman doing a PhD. The third
I can’t remember specifically except that it was a young woman and that I was
the only non-Jewish person there. It was all of them glaring at me for a
moment… me the American… when the subject of Israeli government excesses came
up. It was America that gave the government of Israel its license to steal what
it wanted from the Palestinians, not those Jews at that table or their families
or their nations.

I went back to America 1999 to 2004. I had not looked for a
pro-Palestinian American organization to join when I was back there previously,
1986-1991. But I certainly went looking for one in September of 2000 when Ariel
Sharon ascended Temple Mount under armed guard. By doing that he symbolically
proclaimed that there would never be an end to The Occupation, there would
never be an end to the settlements, there would never be a Palestinian state and
that East Jerusalem would never be its capital. Was he wrong?

Instantly there was the uprising in the Occupied Territories
and a good pro-Palestinian organization came looking for people like me in
those days. It was by way of the picture of the little Palestinian boy holding
his arms out as if with hand flags – or perhaps he did have little flags – as
he stood in front of an Israeli tank, blocking its progress as it advanced into
the little boy’s Palestinian neighborhood. It was the
picture the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC) splashed across
America in full page newspapers advertisements some weeks or months into the
rebellion. I immediately joined ADC and, with their help, I began searching out
Palestinians in the Omaha and Council Bluffs area where I was living and
working at the time. I found few Palestinians who could suggest anything useful
to do or say. Most of a year after Sharon’s fabled foray up Temple Mount, I
finally wrote to my senators from Iowa – Tom Harkin and Charles Grassley… I don’t
recall and response from Harkin. But I know it was Chuck Grassley who did because
I remember that he did reply by way of a forgettable six page corporate letter.
Had he come around to read it to me out loud, it would have sounded like a person
speaking with a mouthful of rocks. I marked up his letter with bits of red ink
and sent it back to him.

Then a few days later there was September 11th. I
was one of those 14% of American citizens or residents said, at the time, to
believe that we brought the attack on ourselves. Double dared them too many
times, in my opinion, then and now. Just asking for it. My blood
pressure shot up 30 points and only came down slowly over the next six months,
I was so enraged to have watched us do that to ourselves. I began to plot my
escape and worked especially hard on some Pacific Island prehistory topics that
might take me back to the Australian National University, a development that
eventuated in 2004.

I had been a polite guest of Australia 1991 to 1999. I was a
Meals on Wheels volunteer and a foster parent but did not get involved in
political issues… a spectator in “the recession Australia had to have” and
other politico-economic issues while comfortably ensconced at the national
university. But when I went back in 2004 it was as an Australian citizen
thinking of the future and I joined the Australian Capital Territory’s
Australians for Justice and Peace in Palestine (AJPP). Or, now that I think
about it, I only found them after returning from my 2005-2006 residence in
Cairo. Once again, a good pro-Palestinian organization found me. This one
through a poster on a pillar that I noticed when whiling away some moments
standing in a line for an ATM. I worked with AJPP for most of two years and
then came back to Cairo where I was going to have to plan out a cheap
retirement. I hadn’t had the consistent academic careers of Wilber and Cleo
Williamson.

I remember the years 1999-2004 back in the United States in
many ways but one memory that made me proud stands out. I was visiting Joel and
Karla Mortensen in Minneapolis. I was reading one of the Church and Life
issues from their coffee table and, like those in my mother’s (Anna Marie
Marck) home in Des Moines, it had some very useful observations on the plight
of the Palestinians. I mentioned it to Joel and he said it was our parents’
good friends Thorval Hansen and, perhaps,
Marvin Jensen writing up those articles. I remembered my father, Arthur Krog
Marck, mentioning that LCA (the Lutheran Church in America),
or perhaps LCA and ALC (the American Lutheran Church)t
jointly, had ongoing relief programs in Gaza. That conversation was in the late
1960s or early 1970s. I was glad to read the Church and Life articles,
to recall my father’s words and to think that one or both of the old synods had
kept some support going to Palestine and may have continued to do so after the
merger.[here]

There were no feasts in Cairo when Obama nominated Hillary
Clinton as secretary of state. The Clintons didn’t even understand why the Oslo
accords immediately unraveled – they were either oblivious to the settlements
issues or felt that they didn’t have the political capital to deal with them
head on. Obama seems the same. His address to the Arab world in Cairo is only
remembered here for the inconvenience of having him in town for the day. Every
major road in Greater Cairo was closed. Obama’s speech was just more “naughty,
naughty” if he talked about the government of Israel’s culpabilities at all. I
don’t remember a word of it, actually. In any event, since that time, there has
been no effective American government action to reel in Israeli Apartheid
whatsoever. There is even the current fear that Obama will veto the UN Security
Council resolution concerning the settlements.

I’m older than Benyamin Netanyahu and I hope we both live
long enough to see the settlements and West Bank abandoned to Palestine as they
should be. That will be the price of America regaining some respect around the
world. For the moment the US government is kind of like mosquitoes in the
summertime or something. One can’t completely get rid of them so one makes
certain accommodations.

I never complained about the Afghanistan project but
wondered how America could possibly prevail when the Soviet Union and colonial
Britain before had failed to do so before. Thrice with respect to the UK. Afghanistan
was a failed state from which we had been attacked. But Iraq was a failed state
that had neither done us wrong nor had any relationship with Al Qaeda except to
keep it out. And where was the American government’s moral capital to be
mucking around in the Middle East, anyway? The Protector of the Shah. The
Funder of Apartheid Israel. Etc.

Boy W. George. The Great Connector of Dots. Conqueror of
Baghdad and Fallujah… Instrument of the Messiah… I’m not paying taxes for it
any more. Literally. A very few days ago I pushed the “Confirm” button on the
Internet payment that involved what I expect to be the last taxes I ever pay to
the United States of America.I shall neveragain be helping to fund its violent adolescence on the world stage.

My wife and I watched the Egyptian Coptic Christmas Eve mass
on TV about the 6th or 7th of this month, as we did last
year. The congregation looked gravely terrified. Pope Shenouda seemed
occasionally to be wiping away tears… as well he might. More than 20 Christians
were murdered in a bombing outside an Alexandria cathedral as they left a New
Year’s Eve mass. I only heard about it some days later. I finally had time to
set up our TV dish that day, as we had recently moved house. The first thing I
got the dish to pick up was footage of a Middle Eastern Christian funeral with
two or three caskets being passed over people’s heads into a cathedral. The
sound wasn’t working yet so I didn’t know where it was. I had heard Christians
were being bombed again and again in Iraq in previous days but only the day
after setting up the TV dish did I come to know that the funeral I saw on TV
was more probably for some of the people in Alexandria… the deadliest such
incident in over 20 years.

If the Yank Congress and presidents gave it a think when Israel cluster-bombed
civilians in Lebanon and phosphorus-bombed civilians in Gaza maybe they would
stop saying naughty-naughty to the Israelis and start telling them to
withdraw the settlements and jolly-well behave themselves. But I doubt that the
recent murder of scores of Christians around the Middle East made Congress want
to do anything more than what it is already doing… slogging on with their “War
on Terror.” Is that one up to a trillion dollars yet? Is the “War on Drugs?” I
don’t take much notice anymore.

Europe is united. There the people believe that the biggest threat to world peace
is Israel. Except for the UK people who think the biggest threat to world peace
is America. For myself, I think the biggest threat to American security
is the American Israeli Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). They have
successfully lobbied Congress to ignore questions of right and wrong for a
number of decades now. September 11 was just the beginning of the price America
continues to pay… the slow-motion knee-jerking that had Boy W. George invading
Iraq, for instance. Ignorant, violent, unreconstructed alcoholic that he is.
Spending trillions in the Iraq war and “War on Terrorism” whose most
significant effect will be remembered as that of driving Iraq closer to the bosom
of Iran.

Why didn’t I know about the Alexandria bombings sooner? Because nobody I know
in Egypt ever talks about anything having to do with America and
Israel. What difference would it make? They don’t. I don’t. I’m glad to never
give it any thought at all... except upon seeing the tears of Baba Shenouda.

TO HELL with the horsies the American Congress rides around upon. A president
who wanted to do right by the Palestinians wouldn’t be allowed to do so by
Congress.

It is one of the difficulties the Egyptian government faces
with its own population: the failure of the Egyptian government to complain
about Israel in any effective way. But the government is constrained by Sadat’s
Camp David agreements with Israel and both governments have promised not to
interfere in the affairs of the other… although Israel is scrambling to do so
now that President Mubarak may soon be taking a permanent vacation in Saudi
Arabia.

Egypt has at least 5000 years’ experience in distancing
itself from events in the Levant. But it leaves the government of Egypt in the
constant position of suppressing the moral indignation of its citizens who want
to ask why no one is doing anything effective about the government of Israel’s
theft of Palestinian land, life and liberty – and the question of why the
government of Egypt should continue such a cozy relationship with the American
government, a government which just goes on and on and on exacerbating troubled
Middle East situations.

The reason falls into the collective American lap, as the
Jewish people I was to tea with in Australia 15 or more years ago implied. The
government of Israel’s license to kill and establish Apartheid is a
specifically American Christian, ever faithful to AIPAC, license to kill.

The New Year’s Eve bombing of the Coptic cathedral in
Alexandria and the current flurry of email I receive from Australia and America
– about getting Obama to vote against Israel in the UN Security Council
showdown on the settlements – has me thinking about all this when usually I
don’t.

On a happier note, I married an Egyptian woman a couple
years ago. And she retires from the national phone company in April. A product
of President Gamal Abdel Nasser’s education reforms 50 years ago and more. Reda
did a two year electrical engineering certificate in an institute Abdel Nasser
opened up to women.

He personally visited her elementary school and encouraged
female education in what he said to those children and shook their hands, as
mentioned some weeks or months ago. So when I kiss her hand I kiss… It isn’t a
story the middle and especially upper middle class likes to hear. It was all
kind of Soviet and a lot of private land and production resources were
appropriated by the government without compensation for their full value and,
at times I am told, no compensation at all.

Reda mainly wears pants and capes and ponchos with her
headscarves.

It is almost certain in our Pyramids neighborhoods, that
almost any woman – or, especially, group of women – without headscarves is
Christian. I was telling this to a young Nigerian-American man who I took on a
brief tour of Pyramids suburbs some nights ago. “Oh, really?” he said, his head
darting about looking for Christians. There was one directly ahead of us by
about 20 yards. She was coming up to the bottom of the stairs up to the Metro
platform and he kept his eyes on her as we walked along in that same direction.
I had swept my arm to the south as we were walking a couple hundred yards from
the municipal bus we had taken from our home to the Metro station bus stop and
said, “There’s a big cathedral and other churches beginning on the next large
cross-street down there. Mostly the Muslims and Christians just kind of
comfortably ignore each other.”

“Look at that woman,” I said, raising my head and pointing
my nose at the possibly Christian woman his eyes had been following. “Nobody’s
bothering her. Look at the way she walks. She’s not worried about
anything.”

Egyptian Muslim city women were progressively giving up the
head scarf up to the time of the 1967 War. Then, like Jerry Falwell on
September 11, who came bursting out the door and blamed the attack on American
homosexuals and others. Many Egyptians couldn’t imagine that God would have
allowed what had happened to them in the 1967 War if they had been living right
just as Falwell imagined it was failures in American values that caused God to
allow the events of September 11. Here, from 1967, the women began to return to
their head scarves and the nation withdrew into greater religious
fundamentalism, just as America has in the last nine years or more.

Now there are some Muslim women giving up the head scarf
again. A very few and they are a bit like hippie chicks in certain ways –
seeking a more international education, world view and identity. Legions of
more and less educated young women are entering the work force and do not
marry, and do not marry, and do not marry and then they get to be about 35 and
there is the question, their embarrassed families’ question most prominently,
of if(no longer “when”)
they will ever get married. In most instances they continue to live with
their parents before marriage… even up to the age of 35 and beyond. They’re
supposed to and often do in any event.

I read some astonishing statistics about the number of never
married Egyptian women aged 35[4]
and some equally astonishing figures on the number of divorced women aged 35
who had never remarried. But then in that same, highly independent and highly
respected newspaper, I read an unquestioned quote of a well-educated and
well-connected woman. She, in the context of an increasing religious
conservatism (or “fashion” – did they call it “fashion” rather than
“conservatism”) discussion, said that ninety or ninety-five percent of Egyptian
women were now wearing the veil – which was certainly off the mark by forty or
fifty percent – an Egyptian proclivity for exaggeration that I am coming to
appreciate a bit more as time goes on. It’s as if people are surprised if you
don’t exaggerate when making a point… as if one isn’t doing a very good job of
it.

So maybe not all the women without head scarves in Pyramids
are Christian. And if their husbands’ wedding rings are gold, that is the
clincher. Muslim men wear no gold. Just silver. But it remains a good rule of
thumb. Probably my wife never went around without a head scarf before 1967. She
grew up amongst observant Muslims in an Upper Egypt city where she would have
worn a headscarf from her early teens or so. But like the legions of poorly
censused professional women of 35 years of age today who have never married,
she hadn’t married by that age either and never did until she married me.

This was all turning over in my mind as we walked mile after
mile in the sprawling suqs of Ataba the other day, looking for a sewing machine
and buying clothes. She picked up a few largish pieces of fabric that she said
were to become ponchos. I began to notice only about three months ago that
she’s the only woman I know or see on the streets who wears ponchos. Hippie chick
or something.

I asked her wonderful cousin, Assim, who introduced us most
of two years ago, what it would have been like for her to go to work for
Telecom with her electrical engineering certificate when she was young. “Forty
years ago?” he said. “They would have put her in the lowest job and kept her
there.” When we got married we rented an apartment near an area telephone
exchange that she’s assigned to so she could walk to work. She was punctually
out the door and on her way to work at 7:45 am on every working day until June
of last year.

Then one June day she came home with one of the phone
company’s health care purchase orders. Fifty percent of Egyptians are said to
have employment-based or other private health cover. Upon the advice of Yanks,
I imagine. One wouldn’t want, for instance, to be giving national health
insurance to one’s unemployed youth – or would one?

Egyptian economic statistics are quoted with greater
precision than social statistics (e.g., never married 35 year old women
estimates) and I have assumed that the “50%” with health insurance that I read
about is roughly accurate. So Reda (“warm satisfaction” – a both male and
female given name) showed me, last June, a Telecom purchase order with the
normal list of arthritis and other medications. But there was also a line that
said “Cataracts” which I had never seen on the forms before… a condition she
had never mentioned at all. She asked me to take her to the eye hospital the
next day and I said, “Sure,” assuming it was for a referral or check-up.

Off we went on the motorcycle – I got it four or five months
after coming back from Australia in 2008. Twenty-nine months and twenty-nine
thousand kilometers on the mean streets of Cairo. But it turned out that Reda
wasn’t at the hospital for a check-up. She was there for the first of two
cataract removal operations that would have her on sick-leave through the next
45 days or more. It kind of took the wind out of her sails with respect to
enthusiasm for her job. With only six or eight months left until retirement
after her time off for the cataract operations, she began taking more sick days
for less convincing reasons and was sent home without pay one day owing to her
late arrival that morning – which was becoming routine.

So she is well and truly ready for retirement and I’m
drifting into a routine of doing native English speaker copy editing for a few
Egyptian and Saudi Arabian translation services – work I get through their
to-ing and fro-ing email of all information and documents to my home. I will be
able to service those accounts from any place in the world with Internet
connections once Reda retires and we will start traveling.

Reda had no brothers and had never married before. Meaning
she, as an Egyptian women of her age, has never traveled abroad for lack of
suitable escorts. So we will be seeing the rest of the Middle East in coming
years. We think nothing of it. Fatherstake their sons to church and mosque and teach them right from wrong.
The murder rates in Cairo and other Middle Eastern cities are as low as in
Tokyo and Amsterdam. Except when people bring terror to those they think would
collaborate with Apartheid Israel and its guarantor – The Failed States of
America. The tears of Baba Shenouda. Any Christian becomes a target. My memory
of Christmas 2010.

I would have peppered this piece with more facts and better
spellings about Danish American Lutherans, American Christians and Jews (do you
follow Forward – a lovely, highly regarded American Jewish newspaper?),
Israel (do you follow Haaretz – a lovely, highly regarded Israeli Jewish
newspaper?), and Egyptian Muslims and Christians. But the Internet was down
through the night.

Following on the heels of the Tunisian Revolution of recent
weeks, Egyptian young people have been doing what they can to shut down traffic
in central Cairo for several days (10 or 12 kilometers away on the other side
of the Nile). A big push was being organized for today again, after a
relatively quiet day yesterday, and since all this is organized over Facebook,
etc., the authorities have shut down the Internet and cell phones altogether. I
will email this missive when email becomes available again, as is. Written from
memory and from the heart.

Egyptian birth rates are getting well lower than in the past
but of course youth unemployment has to do with birth rates fifteen and
twenty-five years ago and they were still very high at the time. So many young
people without higher education or without useful higher education are without
work or, at least, without well-paying work. And they’ve been busy for a day or
two trying to shut down central Cairo road traffic. Even 40 and 50 years ago
when President Gamal Abdel Nasser was asked what worried him most, his reply
was “3000 new Egyptians a day.” It is perhaps more like 4500-5500 new Egyptians
born every day now and something like 3500-4500 young Egyptians, on average,
coming onto the job market every day.

We were up all night, napping off and on, watching the
developments downtown on TV. The Friday noon prayers were called some moments
ago and I’m sitting at my desk at home where I can hear the sermon from the
large nearby mosque’s outdoor loudspeakers. Reda just now came into the room,
curious that I hadn’t left for mosque. But I told her there was trouble downtown
and it was better that the Egyptians go to the mosque, listen to the sermon and
talk it over afterwards without any foreigners.

Egyptians ask me about my past and why I retired here and
why I became Muslim. I’m fond of pointing out to them that I grew up in a
Lutheran church. There no book or person told me that Muslims were going to
hell or that there would be any way of knowing who was going to heaven and who
was going to hell. And that since I imagine I will one day die in Egypt, I
wanted to do so praying with them because their life here is so wonderful. They
find that quite astonishing. “Come on down.” They’re anxious to meet you.

The summer is too hot for all but the most intrepid visitor
(but you get very good price). October and November are nice as are March,
April and May. And December, January and February are also lovely (if you bring
your long johns).

Addenda - 2 February 2011 13:11

So we’ve got our Internet connections back.

I’ve been wondering if you’ve been watching the news of
Egypt these last many days.

Tell me the Egyptian people aren’t magnificent!

Tell me these young people aren’t pretty!

Tell me Obama doesn’t now have all the ammunition he needs
to fire Hillary Rodham Clinton and the American Israeli Public Affairs
Committee!

Tell me Obama shouldn’t be listening instead to that
wonderful ex-US Senator Mike somebody who spoke on our TVs from San Francisco
on about 31 January!

Tell me America wasn’t blindsided by the “rights” approach
while it poured more trillions into the military approach!

Tell me Enok didn’t show us how to open our eyes without
telling us what we would see!

Tell me these gorgeous Egyptian young people didn’t learn a
lot from studying the non-violence of the American civil rights movement!

Tell me the Egyptian upper classes and their children
weren’t taught what democracy is supposed to look like at their beloved
American University in Cairo!

Tell me the Egyptian lower classes weren’t taught what
democracy is supposed to look like in public schools that use American
models of civics!

Tell me this isn’t the beginning of the END
for Halliburton and the military-industrial “complex” General Eisenhower warned
us about!

2.5 days lost trying to get the password (which only(?)
Assim could get – but Mr Monsour did)

0.5 days setting up new ADSL modem

2.5 days trying to get the WiFi working

1.0 days waiting for neighborhood EEs to come look at it who
suggested LE450 modem

0.5 days of panic thinking the problem would never be solved

0.5 days real panic as it first occurred to me that
old modem may have been OK and it might have just been the power supply (and
praying no one had taken it out of the trash and figured out my mistake)

1.0 day home sick in bed

1.0 days trying again but using an old Chinese laptop to
test what I was doing (the old laptop not able to hold on to a signal, anyway)
– partial victory in the end when someone on the far side of the hotel got a
good signal but couldn’t log in – reprogrammed a little and went home, not
knowing if that last burst of activity had any useful result

1.0 days trying to switch home and hotel modems (we don’t
use WiFi at home but it has good WiFi functionality) – end of the day Ahmad
Salah, the evening shift manager, told me the same story as Mr. Monsour (which
I assumed was a misunderstanding) that Ahmad’s laptop was able to hook up
through WiFi at a good high speed – but hotel modem was at home which meant it
would all spill into another day – ISP network goes down.

1.0 days with the home modem back at home and waiting for
ISP functionality and then configuring back to settings for home – five or ten
minutes hooking the hotel modem up again at the hotel – worked instantly –
wrecked the rest of the afternoon fooling around with “access points” that I
was mucking up because I had forgotten how. Rearranged access points (little
boxes with antenna) to put the one with the biggest antenna directly above the
reception area, next floor up, where it also spilt nicely into the dining room
– finding old modem in computer room (someone had rescued it from the trash –
took it home – power supply tested function – unit was not functioning)

1.5 hours lost getting home as there were pro-Tunisian sorts
of demonstrations all along my normal routes and we were detoured all over the
place by the riot police.

28 January 2011 - Fri - Bastille Day - Egypt
27/01/2011

3:35 pm 27 January 2011

Well, it all broke loose after the Friday midday prayers
across the northern cities in the country.

I've seen little distressing violence on Al Jazeera English or the Persian
English channels which we might not have for long.

It isn't Tiananmen Square. The police are not shooting the people at the moment
and the army isn't yet involved at all. The police seem to be retreating and
regrouping rather than trying to fight their way into the crowds. They are
massively outnumbered. Or perhaps you know that from watching Al Jazeera or
PressTV, feeds from those two or coverage from Western news outfits.

The scariest thing I saw on TV involved occasional footage of civilians being
hauled off down side streets by three and five other "civilians" who
are not plainclothes police - they are thugs and day laborers for the
plainclothes police - and can, at least in the past, do what they want with
people they abscond with during demonstrations. In recent years, something like
five (?) years, 2000 Egyptians have disappeared into the hands of such people
and their higher-ups in the Ministry of the Interior and have never been seen
or heard of again.

The Internet was shut down, nationally, overnight and now the mobile phones
don't work.

Reda left, taking the municipal bus for her sister's house more than an
hour ago perhaps. The land lines are working and she's not at her sister's
house yet so I'm well worried although the demonstrations are most of 10 km
away and the ebb and flow of the day seems to be going on as normal in our immediate
neighborhood.

We don't have long distance on our home phone, by the way, so for the moment we
are incommunicado with respect to telephoning beyond the greater Cairo area
code.

Al Jazeera reports that the Internet is working sporadically so I'll get this
going as kind of a diary of the day and try to send it every hour or two.

4:07 pm - Reda just called from her sister's house. Whew. She had lost an hour
or two going to their largest area market. It was crowded with people stocking
up on staples so they don't have to leave their homes for basics. But Reda
didn't want to elbow her way through the crowds and went on over to her sister
Zuba's place.

Police have retaken a main bridge over the Nile in the last 20 minutes or so...
the 6th of October Bridge. Al Jazeera and the Persian channel are saying,
however, that the protesters now have the momentum at Tahrir (Liberation)
Square. They report that some kind of massive government concessions will
eventually be in the offing if the government is to survive at all. When I
first switched on the TV at about 1 pm I thought they were saying that the
Parliament building was already occupied but I haven't heard that again and may
have misunderstood.

Footage of Alexandria seemed to have the sound of automatic weapons going off
at one point. Alexandria is especially incensed with the regime these days.
Right about the time of the fake election two Alexandria policemen went into a
cafe, dragged out a prominent journalist and beat him to death on the footpath
in front of the cafe - right out in the open for all to see. Those two
policemen were never charged with murder or lesser crimes over the incident so
far as I know.

The October Bridge was retaken by the police with what seemed hundreds and
hundreds of volleys of tear gas rather than rubber bullets or worse.

I thought I heard the thumping of gunfire in the distance here in our neighborhood
but I stuck my head out the window and saw it was just a nearby woman beating
carpets on her balcony. My senses have lept to a certain unwanted level of
acuity. This is history and I'm very glad I'm here to observe it.

4:22 pm - The protesters have taken the bridge again. Surging from the Giza
side of the river, perhaps.

The networks are talking about the regime having signed its own death warrant
with the last election... which was a big, complacent, evil joke. I don't think
any international monitors or whatever showed up, it being understood by the
U.N. and the others beforehand that it wasn't something would call an election
anyway. It was just a couple months ago... if that long. And then there was the
Tunisian Revolution. The sun is getting low on this winter afternoon. I'm
wondering if more people will pour into the streets now that they see the
government is using non-lethal methods to try to clear the people from the main
squares, etc.

5:01 pm - The TV is saying police commanders are no longer present on the
streets of Alexandria and the outnumbered foot police are being left to their
own devices, handing over their weapons and shields to protesters and walking
away.

Protesters are burning armored police cars and such other police vehicles as
they gain control of. But I've seen no footage or heard any reports of private
property being destroyed. This isn't a general riot and they're not targeting
private property.

"They" are young people who put all this together on Facebook and
Twitter. Entirely without acknowledged leaders or notables. Joined now by both
men and women of all ages. They have no way of communicating with each other
for now but perhaps they're ducking into small hotels and shops, viewing the
situation on the TVs and reacting accordingly. They don't seem to have moved
around in groups much. Staying where they were just after the noon prayers and
holding their ground as individual projects.

5:15 pm - I had worried about the regime making good on its promise, today, to
confront the protesters with "overwhelming" force by which I assumed
they meant the army. But then the international TV networks emphasized that the
military is highly respected and would not sully its reputation saving the
regime. And, indeed, what seemed to be an armored vehicle of the army showed up
outside the Hilton from which Al Jazeera is streaming the 6th of October Bridge
Battle and the protesters, who are looking to the army to protect them from the
regime's police, ran cheering to the army vehicle and everyone started shaking
hands.

6:30 pm - A curfew was announced at about 5:30 for 6pm-7am. So Reda's stuck at
her sister's place for the night. Not that it would matter. All the shops
stayed open and children are playing in the street in this city of generals
that we live in. Nobody's observing the curfew.

10:30 pm - I slept for a few hours after sunset . The neighborhood is still ignoring
the curfew and I called Reda again on the land line. I said I could probably go
over there and bring her home but I'd rather not have to talk to the police for
any reason on a night like this, although the uniformed police have been very
restrained through the day. It's the plainclothes police and their day labor
thugs who have been a problem through the day... when there have been problems.
I think about five people have been killed in the last 24 hours... three in
Suez City (where there are always more fatalities for some reason) and two here
in Cairo, both, I think it was said, from getting hit on the head by tear gas
canisters rather than bullets, bludgeons, knives, etc. The army has separated
the police from the people and will now watch the city sleep. The protesters, I
suppose it was, have managed to set alight the large national headquarters of
the National Democratic Party, Mubarak's mob, which is right next to the
Egyptian Museum.

12:40 am Saturday January 28 - Well, President Mubarak just spoke for about ten
minutes on state television talking useless drivel so I suppose the
demonstrations will be larger after sunrise and we will once again have no
mobile phone or Internet service. I'm going to bed. Queuing this to
"Send" when we get our Internet back.

Good night and good luck,

Jeff

02 February 2011 - Weds -
13:11 - Internet is back

So we’ve got our Internet connections back.
I’ve been wondering if you’ve been watching the news of Egypt these last many
days.

Tell me the Egyptian people aren’t magnificent!
Tell me these young people aren’t pretty!
Tell me Obama doesn’t now have all the ammunition he needs to fire Hillary
Rodham Clinton and the American Israel Public Affairs Committee!
Tell me Obama shouldn’t be listening instead to that wonderful ex-US Senator
Mike somebody who spoke on our TVs from San Francisco on about 31 January!
Tell me America wasn’t blindsided by the “rights” approach while it poured more
trillions into the "security" approach!
Tell me these gorgeous Egyptian young people didn’t learn a lot from studying
the non-violence of the American civil rights movement!
Tell me the Egyptian upper classes and their children weren’t taught what
democracy is supposedto
look like at their beloved American University in Cairo!
Tell me the Egyptian lower classes weren’t taught what democracy is supposed
to look like in public schools that use Americo-European models of civics!
Tell me this isn’t the beginning of the END for Halliburton and
the military-industrial “complex” that General/President Eisenhower warned U.S.
about!

Oh, glory… Glory… GLORY!!!
Tell me what you will – jeff@jeffmarck.net

02 February 2011 18:55 - Weds - Protesters
hold Tahrir Square

Hi all,

About half of you wrote back immediately while I was out for
the afternoon.

I dropped Reda at her favorite Faisal neighborhood outdoor market and went to
the motorcycle mechanic.

He took care of a small problem and I then stopped at my carpenter's shop near
Reda's sister's place where she was to go by toktok after shopping.

The men at the shop were glued to the TV where street fighting was seen from
Cairo for the first time since things heated up a week ago. They asked me what
I thought so I asked, "Who will come after Mubarak? Gamal (Mubarak's son)?
This is Korea? The father. Then the son. And then the grandson...?" I
started plotting out a map in the air showing where Korea was and that it was
North Korea that I was talking about but I needn't have bothered. They knew
exactly what I was talking about and were glad to have that answer for the tips
of their tongues.

I saw two bands of sociopaths in our Pyramid neighborhoods today - 10 or 12 men
each - men the Ministry of the Interior hires to do their Cairo thug work - one
small band on Tersa Street in my old neighborhood. One small band moving down
one of the main avenues - Faisal or Pyramids, I forget which. They had placards
and were chanting slogans that they seem to have learnt imperfectly - all of an
age, 35 to 45, and wearing the same weathered coats, pants and shoes they wear
when they have disrupted peaceful demonstrations downtown over the years. The
people in the cafes etc. were just ignoring them.

But if you have a member of congress or parliament who might lend an ear it is
worth telling them immediately that this has been the pattern of suppression
for many years. True, otherwise unemployable sociopaths with black jacks and
sometimes knives - and the fired red bricks that magically appear when they do.
These guys leading the counter protests are simply the same sociopaths Interior
has hired for decades to suppress any gathering of opposition groups. Over 2000
people have disappeared into their hands in recent years. Hauled off and never
heard of again, just as you may have seen in the first days of the protest on
TV. It's Interior ("undercover" police, secret police, etc.) that
cooperate with American style disappearances of people and committal to torture
chambers, etc., not the Army, as I understand the situation. It made my skin
crawl when I saw those kinds of men on TV, hauling off young people down side
streets, etc.

I've heard not terribly distant gun fire every night but one.

But the networks are reporting no persons missing from downtown - but who would
know under the circumstances - or persons killed by gunfire in the neighborhoods.
If you're able to watch Al Jazeera English or Iran's PressTV you know as much
about it as me. CNN would seem to be staffed by corporate zombies for the
moment.

The protesters held Tahrir Square, night is setting in and there are, one would
hope, few people in the outside world who watched it all on TV and believed the
attempt to dislodge them was anything but choreography out of Interior. But the
numbers of young protesters at Tahrir now seems very small. If their parents
called them on the phone and ordered them to come home for fear of a
deteriorating situation... well... there's that aspect in all this, too.

I stopped by Reda's sister's place and picked up the groceries. She stayed
there so we don't have to fight over the TV's remote tonight.

The main checkpoints/"barriers" are getting more sophisticated and
the youth seem to have brought in police they trust, who are in plain clothes
but obviously savvy, to help them with their procedures and decisions. The
leader at the check point at the 1st Dobat entrance even wore the kind of
jumper police wear - of that style but not the Interior issue itself. I was a
distressing case to those polite citizens since I couldn't produce anything
with my Dobat home address on it. But they had routinely checked my backpack,
knew I had only groceries and the older ones left it to the younger ones to
talk to Reda on the mobile and see if she was telling the same general story as
me.

I wondered before all this what it would mean for us to be living in one of the
City of Generals (Dobat or Zobat Haram (Remaya/Pyramids)) if things came to
something like they have in the last week.

But it's Army generals who bought these flats, not police generals, and
everyone loves the Army this week and always has. The barriers within Dobat had
been manned all night by the youth up to about middle aged men, grandfathers in
lawn chairs on the sidewalks or nearby patios. Around here last night, well
inside our little town, they were down to one or two bored young men last
night. There's little amiss, apparently. The nearest mosque is some three
hundred meters away and has been broadcasting information to us from their
outdoor loudspeakers during recent days when we didn't go out at all.
Escaped prisoners - many prisons simply emptied out, one way or another - were
moving through the area and perhaps the gun shots I heard through those nights
were simply a rouse to discourage the escapees from coming in this direction.

Much army heavy equipment - tanks and armored personnel carriers - is parked at
the bottom of the hill we live on where they are at the ready to dash down
Faisal Street or Pyramids Street where there is other heavy equipment and their
associated troops. Nobody with nefarious purposes has any way to get into our
development without passing the main checkpoints where our two main streets
come up the hill from Fayoum Road, the initial leg of the national highway to
Upper Egypt. We haven't heard any heavy Army equipment scooting around this
high on the hill since the first night they were here, three or four days ago.
The bored youth of Dobat finally have purpose, patriotic purpose, in their
quiet evening gatherings at the development's larger and smaller internal
intersections.

So I will spend a quiet night, home alone. Reda's sister's place is deep into
the barrios and it's just the grandfathers watching the streets from chairs at
their doorsteps. The goon squads would simply be accosted by area men and the
goons don't have any reason to go into those streets, anyway.

Reda was watching "counter protests" on government television last
night but it was so obviously staged and the same 50 sociopaths playing up to
the cameras hour after hour. No women or children as there have been amongst
the Tahrir Square multitudes. All the fake counter protest men of an age - 35
to 45 - their signature, really.

I just went into the lounge room and watched TV for a few minutes... they were
talking about "counter protesters..." the young people making
citizens' arrests of these people when violent in their midsts and
finding, when they turn them over to the Army, that their national
IDs show actual employment with Interior in many instances.

Mostly we've just been at home fighting over the TV remote... switching back
and forth between Al Jazeera and Persian TV English broadcasts and the
pro-government Arabic broadcasts Reda prefers to follow. To her, Mubarak is the
designated successor of Sadat who was the designated successor of Abdel Nasser
who gave her education, opportunity and a career. All gave her quite a lot,
actually, and she burst into tears last night when Mubarak said he would not be
running for election again later in the year. The world, as she has known it,
is about to change. We had never talked politics before. No one ever did. Best
not to until only a few days ago, actually.

Breathlessly,

Jeff

04 February 2011 21:30 - Fri - From Cairo:
no protester deaths today?

My friends,

I dug into catching up with some neglected favors owed through last night so I
might have the utter weariness to sleep through the afternoon as things started
up for the day again. I went to bed just as the midday prayers were over.

Very hard to sit in front of the TV and watch protester bodies hauled off day
after day. But still, the toll now is said to be under 500 and perhaps as low
as 300 and I've now been rattling around the house for a couple hours and there
don't seem to have been any deaths of protesters or any others through this day
so far.

The killers are paid Ministry of Interior employees, actual employees.
And their $17 a day temp workers. True sociopaths that they are, they will quit
killing when the money for doing so dries up. And they all disappeared even
quicker when the Army rolled in a few days ago. It was the Army that stopped
the police killings.

Now that the American government has more familiarity with the costs and
futility of security-based approaches, and from Iraq to Pakistan their security
"partners" have been more or less telling them to bugger off in the
last many days, they might take note of the Egyptian uprising's rights-based
approach, its economies and its possible relevance to Israel-Palestine.

Netanyahu and the others just seem to be pooping their pants. The little
shit, anyway (I'm older than he is). I hope the little dag is just writhing.
Picture it. A writhing little dag. I hope he has a stroke like Sharon and they
both wake up in ten years to see the settlements have all been removed to
the Negev.

That's been one side of it that's just as well but for the many deaths we've
been counting day to day for what now seems a very long time.

Will Bush and Blair now politely drink hemlock and wander off to their rightful
places in the history books?

Probably not nor will certain other people who might well politely do so, too.
But their sins, after all, are not so great and were committed in the context
of America's conflicted and overpowering "principals" which had been
imposed on them.

Totally amazing to me is that Blair is still the "lead man", is it
called, for the "quartet", is it called? Who only a few weeks ago
said that if there was a two state solution Israel would get to keep the
settlements and Palestine "will get, ah.... ah…. what's left." That
is, precisely, what I saw him say on TV less than a month ago.

We still have much to do... foremost of which is to scream bloody murder that
Blair is the "lead man" of the "quartet" who, presumably,
awaits the nod of Washington before he does anything. Hopefully, Obama will
continue to be as irrelevant to the rights-based approach as he has been in the
past and American, security-minded influence will essentially end in the
region, the Iraq War now seeming to have driven Iraq into the bosom of Iran.

But there will still be Israel... and Netanyahu's soiled knickers.

This is just great. And it was the Egyptian young people, who I love, who did
it on the Tunisian model. Apartheid Israel's settlements may be removed to the
Negev before I'm dead and gone after all.

I was approached by a middle-aged, somewhat portly plainclothesman in front of
my apartment building yesterday in this City of (Army) Generals (Dobat,
Pyramids, Giza) and asked to accompany him in his car. We hadn't actually
picked the right horse or anything. My wife works just down the street at
Remaya Central, the central telephone exchange for Dobat and Hadaba, I think it
is called, and we live here so she can walk to work. I really never asked
questions about what kind of generals we were living with - sustaining the
fiction my wife and I lived with that such things didn't matter. It was an
enormous relief, some days into the uprising, to learn that they were Army
generals all. I didn't ask directly. No police generals. I forget how, exactly,
I found out.

So the plainsclothesman approached me yesterday and asked where I lived.

I pointed to the building in front of us.

He asked if I had a car.

I pointed to the motorcycle chained to the lamp post behind him.

He asked if I didn't know any better than to be out taking pictures at a time
like this.

I said, "I wanted one to show my house at the barriers. They don't all
know what the building numbers mean and then I have to call my wife and it all
takes a lot of time." He had witnessed me taking a picture, the last
in a series that I was taking - pictures of all the rooms in our house (built
to the same plan as all the others), the apartment number on the entrance door,
etc.

"Could you come with me please," he said, indicating his car and
retaining possession of my mobile phone which contained the offending camera.

"Sure," I said.

There was a protocol current, as I would soon find out. Anyone, any foreigner
anyway, caught taking pictures had to be taken to a certain Army office complex
nearby and questioned or something. For all I knew the plainclothesman
could be from Interior - into the hands of which 2000 live bodies have
disappeared and never been seen or heard of again in recent years. I shuttered
through recent days as I saw protesters being hauled off down side streets by
the same Interior goons doing the killing, live in front of cameras, on TV, in
Liberation (Tahrir) Square. But this was Dobat, it was Army, and no one ever
disappears in the hands of the Army. So off I went, 99.9% sure he was Army and
thinking we were going to the main barrier at the entrance of one of the two
roads into our housing complex. Like there was now an official or semi-official
command post there.

But we drove right past that, the barrier still manned by plainclothesmen who
mostly looked to be about the age of some of the generals' sons who still live
with their parents; just as has been the case for some days; and we drove out
onto the road to Upper Egypt which I wasn't happy about at all. But we turned
left after a short kilometre or two and were then facing the gate in a long
tall wall which entirely hid whatever establishment was behind it, only the
pyramids on the Giza Plateau visible above the wall and its gate. The gentleman
gave his ID card to a guard, the gate opened and we parked after going 20 or 40
meters into the complex which wasn't very deep and which I knew was not very
wide because of the length of the front wall.

I suppose I could have checked to see if there were bars on the windows of the
building we were entering but it didn't occur to me at the time and we entered
into a large, white marbled foyer that was bright with light from large windows
to the rear. We went upstairs and I was delivered into the spacious, tidy
office of a man of rank... probably a general... who was maybe 40 years old.

It is worth adding that the civil service, as we know it in the West, is
supervised to a large extent by Army generals in Egypt who rotate through Immigration,
Health perhaps, and other ministries during their career and are often sort of
MBA types. Their "troops" are the civil service people at those
particular assignments. They don't have a big reputation for taking bribes like
the police and Interior in general.

I didn't know immediately the gentleman's agenda; his name, I eventually found
out when I asked, turned out to be Sharif; but my agenda was to confirm, as
soon as there was an opening, my expectation that he was probably Army.

After looking over my bona fides and happily finding out that I had been
in Pyramids about three years and not just three days or something; he
explained that the plainclothesman had to bring me in because of the use of the
camera and he, personally, had to confiscate the phone's tiny memory cards...
which had recently cost me $12 for the two. (The memory cards, not the SIM card
that makes the phone operational and contains backup memory of the phone
numbers one has saved).

I asked if we could just delete the offending photograph but he said, no, the
procedure presently in force was that he had to take the memory cards, both of
them, even though the one was so new it had nothing on it.

There had been other preliminaries where he quickly relaxed when I started
rattling away in my Arabic baby talk if a point wasn't getting through quickly
in English, when I spoke only Arabic when I called Red, and explained my
circumstances to her, when he relaxed more again during his talk with her on
the phone, when he relaxed even more and felt a bit chuffed when he saw me
relax after asking, as innocently as possible, whether he was Army or police
and was told he was Army.

I mention him relaxing in the sense of getting less and less formal. He
continued to move through the topics to be covered rather crisply.

I don't recall if he was wearing a uniform... I think I remember a blue and
white shirt patterned shirt so perhaps it was civilian clothes. He was very
quick and bright and businesslike and engaging as a human being and we were
making more eye contact than kind of looking each other over. Finally he gave
me back the very nicely produced computer scanned and color printed copies of
Reda's passport and mine along with my driver’s license and said, "Would
you like a cup of tea? You have to have a cup of tea."

We conversed about something I don't quite recall while awaiting my cup of tea
and through the time I drank it. My copy editing work, perhaps. I was getting
anxious to be out the door as I just use my Australian passport these past many
years, my American dual-nationality hadn't come up and I wanted to get away
before it did. I remember he gave me a cigarette to go with the tea when it
arrived and we exchanged phone numbers. When I stood up to leave I slapped my
pants pockets and checked my wallet and then had to ask, "Would you have a
pound and a half for the bus? I just left the house to get some exercise for my
legs and feet. I didn't put any money in my pockets before I left." He
gave me everything in his right pocket, four pounds and a half, I think, but
then the plainclothesman had arrived again and drove me back to my apartment
building's front door. As when we had driven to the Army base, we didn't
converse.

I haven't been out of the house again and have little to do, as the telling of
the story of General Sharif may suggest.

But it is a story worth telling.

When the protesters and general citizenry are asked to consider having these
kind of men administering the nation for some interim period or something, they
largely do so under current circumstances and the ranks of generals are
filled by men (and women?) such as Mr. Sharif. They're often just plainly gamil
(gorgeous). They're like the finest administrators amongst Western civil
servants who leave their politics at home when they go off to work. And Arabs do
consider themselves Western, by the way. So the Yank congress, Blair and others
who think they are in a cultural or religious conflict are simply encountering
resistance from cultures that are more similar than they imagine because they,
the Yank congress and Blair, are not presenting a rights-based conflict
resolution model.

Look at www.americansincairo.org[5]
- I think I have four years of "semi-official" opinion as to what
Mubarak and others believe is wrong with what America and Blair have tried to
do in the neighborhood, why it will fail, how long it will take to fail, etc., ad
nauseum. And for 30 years Mubarak had to suppress popular opinion emanating
from aspirations grounded in rights, as they watched Israeli Apartheid grow and
grow and grow and become the disgusting monster that it is today - defended at
all costs by the American government and its security-based models. Filthy
contraptions that they are.

I'll bet Netanyahu is just wearing nappies these days. It's wonderful to see
him squirm.

Thank you for your time,

Jeff

05 February 2011 - Sat - 21:33 From Cairo:
first things first

My friends,

Another day without fatalities amongst the protesters - Hamdullah. Al Jazeera
English is still operating out of its Cairo office and from the street but the
Al Jazeera Arabic office was closed down today and some of their
staff arrested. I think the arrests and closing may have been done by Interior
- wouldn't be the Army - and other reports indicate that uniformed (?) police
are coming back onto the streets after being absent since the day of the
highest fatalities - ? the 27th or 28th ? or maybe it was the 29th. Kind of a
blur as we were up and down, sleeping in small bits at different times of the
day depending on when things were happening or still receiving useful comment
and analysis - useful new interviews 24 hours a day because there is really no
time of day or night, our time, that there isn't someone new to interview many
time zones to the east, west or both. Then last night there had been no
fatalities during the day or evening so I finally had a good long sleep from 2
or 3 am.

Reports from the English channels (Al Jazeera and PressTV) towards early evening,
a few hours ago, included interviews with people elevated to positions at or
near the top within the regime over the last many days. One of them was
explaining, at some length and in some detail in the longest such interview
that I caught, that there is a constitutional way for Mubarak to sign off from
his responsibilities as president, kind of one by one and in a certain order;
promulgate, by decree, some of the things demanded by the protesters under
State of Emergency procedures (which would free time up for the new parliament
because they would already be law, etc.). He seemed sincere. We shall see what
we shall see. It would mean others could call the end result a revolution but
would, constitutionally, at the front end, be acts of members of the current
government who accomplish these noble deeds.

It really might take them a couple weeks to go through the stages he was
talking about and the protesters might really just stay in Tahrir Square while
they do.

The phone company service centers, "centrals," are opening up again
tomorrow so Reda will be going back to work after being off the whole of last
week.

I just work at home and could have worked through the last 10 days when we all
started taking notice - but I've been the zomboid and just glued to the
TV. If there are still people being killed, I want to watch out of respect for
them. This evening I finally picked up the copy editing where I left off... a
large, continuing project I can work on as much as I want.

PressTV (Iran) - which is gleeful about all this - has been airing a
lovely parade of full screen still photos showing all this as following the
same script as the departure of the Shah:

1. the mass protests

a picture of the Iranian
masses 30 years ago

a picture of the Egyptian
masses this and last week

another picture of the
Iranian masses 30 years ago

another picture of the
Egyptian masses this and last week

etc

etc

2. picture of the Shah signing documents followed by picture
of Mubarak signing documents
3. the swearing in of a "new" cabinet by the Shah followed by the
swearing in of a "new" cabinet by Mubarak

4. pictures of more mass protests

a picture of the Iranian
masses 30 years ago

a picture of the Egyptian
masses this and last week

another picture of the
Iranian masses 30 years ago

another picture of the
Egyptian masses this and last week

etc

etc

5. more of the same... with different versions of Items 2
and 3

6. Item 4 again.
7. A picture of the Shah getting on a plane and leaving Iran.

Egypt went back to work today. At least the day shift and
only in fits and starts.

Which is just as well because for tens of millions of Egyptians,
a day the parents don't work is a day the family doesn't eat.

Thanks to those Australians for Justice and Peace in
Palestine people who have written in recent days. It brings back a lot of
wonderful memories. Here I live in a whole nation that thinks like us at AJPP
(but can't do anything about it because of the American government).

Today Reda went back to work, walking there as usual. It's only right around
Tahrir Square, and a few, I will admit, very, very poor and transient neighborhoods,
that an Egyptian has to worry much about what's going on about them at the
present time.

After work, Reda took the bus to her sister Zuba's where I
picked her up in time to get us home before the 7pm curfew.

The banks were to open today. Maybe they did. I didn't get
to ours until about 2pm, perhaps, and Reda now tells me they were all open but
only until 1pm. But she didn't physically go into town and see one open - so
maybe not. The ATMs were out of money or something by the time I got to mine
and I didn't even see queues at the others I passed... nothing left there
either.

LOTS of Egyptians have the idea that Israel caused this or
America caused it. Cairo is an entirely different experience for me, through
the TV, than it was only two weeks ago but that is not so true of Pyramids
where I am known to certain people in certain places. I ride a motorcycle so I
just put on my helmet and no one even knows that I'm a Europoid on my way to
the places I know people and am welcome. People at the bank who were queued up for
the ATM kind of wondered what I was doing there but I eventually found a small
excuse to speak Egyptian to one or two briefly and everybody soon forgot that I
was there.

There were no petrol stations with petrol on the main roads
I took to town, El Fayoum, Remaya Roundabout and Pyramids streets, but I
slipped into my old neighborhood's minor thoroughfare down from Pyramids
and El Arish streets (Tersa and Ezzadin Omar) and the first station was
furiously pumping petrol but had no queue to speak of.

Then I stopped to see Tarek, my composer friend at the recording studio. He was
there and so was a violinist who I know well. We were so happy to see each
other after 10 days that we didn't talk politics at all. Which we had never
done before anyway. Egyptians just didn't in the past and I'm hearing more
stories like mine - the subject of politics never came up amongst Egyptians in
the past because there was nothing one could do about it anyway. And many are
finding spouses often have different, even profoundly different notions of the
past and present like Reda and myself.

After 7 or 8 days of being house-bound, I some days ago
ended the fight for the remote by retreating to the Internet once the daily
deaths report was over. I think I mentioned previously that a good place
to start is:

They started the flurry of independent press by setting a standard in print
from 2004 that talked about things in a way that didn't result in arrests and
shutdowns. Others followed suit, a real flurry. There now seem to be 20 or more
different newspapers to choose from. I've not heard of any Egyptian newspaper
closures and I think Iran's PressTV (English) would be glad to have reported on
it if such had happened at all.

Reda and her sister Zuba keep their eyes glued to the
official channels which is how I found them at about 6pm. Zuba fed me and then
Reda and I went straight home where I had a 2 hour copy editing job waiting for
me from Saudi Arabia. Reda jumped straight to the remote and began
watching TV. I was in America 11 September 2001 and we were the same. I forget
how long it was before the TV schedule got back to normal.

Between Tarek and Zuba's I had stopped at Ashraf the carpenter's shop because
Reda's cousin cum brother, who introduced us two years ago, had called
and said he was over there.

Assim owns a 22 room "Egyptian" hotel that's normally full at
this time of the year. He's ruined, essentially, for the year at least, because
of the current situation. There might be something for him after the
summer, Egypt having few visitors other than Gulf and Saudi Arabs during
the summer. But he had just a year ago, after 6 years of being back in
business, expanded to the 6th floor from the 7th in his quiet Talaat Harb
Square side street building. He had, by about 2000, put together enough money
to open a backpacker camp in Dahab on the Gulf of Aqaba. Then certain terrorist
attacks wrecked the visitor industry for long enough to make him have to sell
the place he put together... for next to nothing, I suppose.

Now, in spite of the US/Euro recession, he has built up such a good name that
he had few empty rooms when the head-on competition was often languishing a
bit. Things were going so well that he finally got the car his wife wanted for
so long... him, too, of course but a steady keel for the hotel came first. A
new car, in fact. Now he's got three years of payments on the car which people
like him in the visitor industry may just have to give to the bank, one would
guess. He's at:

So his sympathies do not, for the moment, lie with the people who still occupy
Tahrir Square.

He doesn't have the visceral dislike and fear of the police thugs that I do.
Those who were on the world stage a week ago when they killed so many people.
I've known of them for most of 6 years as I first stayed right on Tahrir
Square when looking for a little flat to buy in 2005 and then saw them again
and again since late 2005 when I first met Assim and since coming back in
2008 because the attempted demonstrations from 2005 began at Talaat Harb Square
closer to Assim's hotel. I've not seen many protests. Not five, I suppose. But
they all followed the same script...

The one attempted march whose organisers I later saw mentioned by name in an
English language newspaper was a tiny little group who wanted to march
from Talaat Harb Square two long blocks to Tahrir Square and hope the masses
would join them. But they were kind of like the Socialist Workers Party in
Australia... too small in number and too obscure in terms of the dozens of
issues they had positions on for the average person on the street take any
notice of them. I knew that the police "thugs" - coarse looking
people all - were normally successful in dispersing them, chasing them back
into the neighborhoods to the east and northeast of Talaat Harb Square before
they got to Tahrir Square itself. Of course Assim and other visitor industry
people were relieved, whatever their sympathies for the occasional issue they
could identify with. The "masses" never joined them anyway, in terms
of what I saw from 7th and 9th floors of hotels or otherwise knew.

And shutting down Tahrir Square, I used to calculate as I waited for red lights
there and on the thoroughfares that led into it, would soon have hundreds of
thousands of cars in gridlock, costing, how much would one guess, per hour, of
a person making enough to own a car... not to mention the tens or
hundreds of thousands of people stuck on buses and taxis... the numbers would
drift through my mind. Millions of dollars an hour in lost time, perhaps.

I've been writing in recent days as if the police thugs were day labourers
along with their ~10% Interior Ministry plainclothes supervisors but now I am
not so sure.

I asked Assim early this evening what they were called.

"What?" he asked.

"The men with the blackjacks brought in to make crowds go away," I
said.

"You mean the police?"

"Not the police. The men who come and beat the people trying to shut down
Tahrir."

"Oh, the police who have never been to school... don't know how to
read... don't know how to write... ?"

"Yes."

"Amnimarakazi," he said evenly and turned to other subjects
(amni-mara-kazi [first syllable stress on each of those sub-parts]).

So perhaps they are full-time employees although various news agencies talked
about "$17 a day" thugs at various times as well.

We all had our tea with Ashraf and departed to run errands before the 7pm
curfew. Reda and I were waived through the barrier to Dobat. It was dark but we
looked harmless, I suppose.

The men at Ashraf's were all sullenly relieved that some aspects of their lives
would now begin to return to normal. Everybody is. But the young people still
hold Tahrir and the pictures of it on TV when we got home tonight seem to show
larger tents and impromptu structures that weren't there before today. There
remain barricades the protesters made out of burnt vehicles and any big pieces
of steel they could tear loose from fences and lamp posts and so on in the
final days before the Army moved in and prevented the police from entering the
area and killing people.

The traffic police were back to normal duties. They had disappeared from the
street altogether after the many police murders of about 27, 28 and 29 January.
All the police disappeared once the Army rolled into downtown and the neighborhoods.
Other kinds of police will be welcomed back in neighborhoods along Faisal
and Pyramids streets. The uniformed and plainclothesmen aren't just government
spies. Many of them are what best practice recommends in terms of actually
introducing themselves to new residents, getting a sense of developing feuds
and friction between families or individuals, leading mediation on the street,
etc. blending in to roles of respected elders from the churches and mosques.
There are plenty of both them if there is trouble. In my own neighborhood off
Tersa Street the only neighborhood trouble that I ever saw was
between two teenage boys and their respective friends. I saw the one boy on the
street below me one night apparently off to do battle alone, his sisters (I
would guess) with their hands clasped about his wrists, trying to make him come
home, had finally brought him to a halt just below my lounge room window. There
was a police car parked at the end of the street with four uniformed officers
the next morning and 24 hours a day for the next week. And that end of that.
"Officer presence."

There was a wedding party inching along with the slow Faisal Street traffic as
the sun was starting to get low. The wedding's sound system had been set up on
a ute (pickup truck) to blast the standard wedding songs and the cars in that
train were beeping out the standard wedding horn honking. A sight not seen for
some time, perhaps, and people stopped to watch and smile.

I heard no laughter on the street as one might expect. The nation and its
people are heading into uncharted waters and in our Pyramids neighborhoods are
either solemn or angry.

Egypt is in no position to see the economy come to a standstill or even slow
down. The visitor industry... just 6% of GDP, I think... is wrecked until
September at least. And people will be holding tight to their savings in
present circumstances slowing growth in consumer industries - whitegoods and
new car sales first one would expect. The days the economy was paralysed
amounted to a loss of two or three percent of GDP I'd estimate based on
other kinds of reports I have seen or heard.

The economy is not very diversified but has been industrialising at a higher
rate of late and jobs had been opening up for the migrants from Upper Egypt and
the Delta where there is no further water from the Nile to open up more farming
for the very large number of young people born fifteen and twenty-five years
ago. Without economic growth, the numbers of unemployed will swell: illiterate
youth, youth who are high school graduates, and, the young and higher
educated unemployed as well. The ranks of unemployed youth will swell
even more than they have if the current politico-economic cronyism doesn't
morph into more freedom and diversity for entreprenuers. For the moment they,
and Egyptians amongst them most of all, can be constrained by lack of personal
contacts with the elites who can navigate business licenses etc. for them from
an unresponsive bureaucracy - or rather one that in some instances only
responds to "courtesy" of applicants.

The half or so of Egypt's population who couldn't really eat properly or at all
without daily income couldn't see things go on as they had but now there is a
bit of everybody getting their own way. The regime will not simply disband, on
the one hand, like it slowly did in Tunisia but the protests will be allowed to
go on, on the other.

I think I saw Hillary Clinton calling for Mabarak to leave soon or right away
or something. But America is no place to be looking for leadership in the
current situation as its government is largely responsible for the conflicted
contraptions that Egypt has had to endure in its Israel policy which has so
poisoned Egypt's relations with other Muslim nations, at least. For this and
related reasons, there isn't much of an ear turned towards American government
ideas at the present time, especially in the context of lingering
notions that Israel or America started the uprising somehow.

But affection for America is not lacking. It is their beloved American
Univerity in Cairo that filled so many upper-class student's heads with
expectations of rights-based solutions. Following on those heels, Cairo
University and the other Egyptian universities were then, perhaps, free to
espouse similar principles. They all would have longer ago if the
government wasn't forced into suppressing the moral indignation of what the
American government was allowing and funding Israel to do in Gaza, the West
Bank and East Jerusalem.

If the government of America wants to "help" in the current situation
it must first do so by censoring Israel in the UN and initiating a process by
which Palestine is given back to the Palestinians (for Israel to return to its
borders before the 1967 war). To do this they will have to enter directly into
negotiations with Hamas who remain the elected parliamentary majority in Gaza
and the West Bank. Before the Hamas victory, the Palestinian Authority had
become as lazy and comfortable and corrupt as Egypt's ruling party as it lived
through decade after decade of American-imposed conflicted principles and
stalemate with Israel. But it wasn't stalemate for Israel. It's government
doubled then quadrupled their settlements' population since 11 September 2001 -
the most basic cause of the attacks on America that day.

As I said a day or two ago, now that the Congress of the United States of
America has had more experience with the cost and utter futility of a
"security" based approach, maybe it will become more curious about a
"rights" based approach. Since they presently lack such an approach,
no one in Egypt is going to be looking to America for "help". They
don't need it, they don't want it, they won't accept it and the Yank populace
will go on, and on, and on... wondering what went wrong.

A quiet day in Cairo's southwesternmost suburbs and all the others so far as I
know. Protesters are sustaining large numbers in their little piece of
"Liberated Egypt" (Tahrir Square).

Road traffic ratcheted up a notch or two through our neighborhoods but not to
the level of what it was before the revolt began.

Since yesterday, at least, the very large trucks with flatbed trailers that
transport the Army tanks and armoured personnel carriers have appeared and have
started hauling the initial few away from Pyramids' major arteries.

Construction projects have been in full swing since yesterday - the labourers
working the small, on site, concrete mixers furiously and noisily - 12 story
apartment buildings on small lots in the neighborhoods at least. One of the
last open air canal segments in the southwest of the Pyramids area floodplain
is being dredged and a concrete structure built into it that will have a
concrete roof upon which outdoor cafes and park-like areas will then exist -
the canal flowing underground in the concrete structures as those of Tersa
Street and others now do. Something about the hydraulics of the Nile as it runs
through town and its canals through the floodplain don't seem to allow just
filling such canals in. All the water, after all, is going to irrigate the
farms of the Delta in which 40+ million of Egypt's 80+ million people live.
There might be so much of it in the canals still open or now covered that it
would raise the level of the Nile where it flows through the centre of Greated
Cairo.

If I will come to retain only a single memory of today it will probably be that
of a TV channel my wife and her sister were watching. It will be that memory
because of the visuals in a particular video collage of still shots that went
on for many, many minutes: images of progress and prosperity - tons of pictures
of factories and other elements of the economy and then tons of pictures
of Egyptian family life - middle and upper class at least - everything
from the dinner table to the beach - Egyptian flags all over the place blended
with the pieces of the collage floating across the screen that kept changing
with a sweet, melancholic male voice singing for the audio component of the
video with full orchestration and a plaintive, comforting audio effect overall.

I was thinking it was a rally-round-the-past presentation but then the video's
images shifted to Tahrir Square and well washed, dressed and rested protesters
of all sizes, shapes, genders and ages, usually with lots of Egyptian flags in
their hands, and it went on for a long time with appealing images of diverse,
ardent demonstrators.

So it was put together to create a feeling that the protests are or will come
to be embraced as a cherished piece of Egyptian life and history, too.

I was the only one watching at the time and I asked Reda, now that we are home,
what channel it was and who owned it. She said the channel was El Masriya
and it was indeed government owned and the piece broadcast during their news
presentation El Saniya - the name in the upper right of the screen that
I jotted down at the time.

Further to what I wrote some hours ago, Egyptian government
television in general, on its many channels, now seems to be valourising the
uprising and I will get back to the breadfruit revolution (see signature of
this message).

I'm not really watching the TV much anymore and Al Jazeera and PressTV are
going back to more and more of their regular programming.

I do check the TV once or twice a day to see how big the Tahrir Square crowds
are and they remain substantial.

- has worked hard to be worthy of our trust in their reporting of days like
these and I hope you have a look every day or two.

The American government and the American Israel Public Affairs Committee need
informed criticism and censor - to your Senators and Members of Congress and
Obama if you're a Yank... otherwise you always have the option of sending hate
mail to your nearest American embassy... whatever.

I thought I would be done with missives until Friday which is to be the big
protest day in coming weeks (and months?).

But the Tahrir crowds massed larger than ever today, some also surrounding the
Ministry of the Interior and others the Parliament building. Old people, young
people, children - people from every walk of life.

What is more significant to the average east-side Greater Cairo resident is
less reported on Al Jazeera English and PressTV: this involves the occupation
now, or at least inconveniencing of road traffic, at Ramses Square which, even
more than Tahrir Square, perhaps, is the busiest intersection downtown and is 3
or 4 kilometres to Tahrir's northnortheast. And those rues lead out of downtown
into the affluent suburbs of Heliopolis, New Cairo, etc. So more hundreds of
thousands of cars and other road traffic are having to take seriously
circuitous routes to their destinations.

Things now seem to be following even more closely the Tunisian pattern - the
first demand of the Tunisian uprising was for the president to leave and now
the Egyptian uprising is following suit - when that possibility was initially
dismissed by the presidents, the result in both cases has been a considerable
increase in the number of protesters. I guess the Google executive Wael Ghonim,
who heads Google's Middle East and North Africa marketing divisions, visited
Tahrir after his release Monday after nearly two weeks in custody, during which
he was blindfolded (the whole time?) and interrogated. So that has also been
mentioned as an impetus for more people to flow into Tahrir and stay longer
when they do. More and more notables in Egypt's cultural and business world are
stopping by as well.

The sage notions of Condoleeza Rice that the war in Iraq would result in a
"blossoming of democracy in the Middle East" - by way of the security
approach - is no longer just dead, it is being buried altogether by the
Tunisian and now Egyptian rights-based approaches. Egyptian friends say it is
spreading in Yemen and Jordan, at least, more than what English news sources
available in Egypt are mentioning. I think they were saying specifically that
the Yemeni president is simply going to resign and leave a transitional group
to write up a new constitution, etc. I shall forever be quick to point out that
the main result of the American government's security hysteria and Iraq War has
been to drive Iraq into the bosom of Iran. Osama Bin Laden couldn't have
dreamed of a better result.

Whenever an Egyptian pauses for a second, after mentioning Bush, and begins to
specify which one, I chirp in with "Boy George?", which amuses even
those too young to remember the gay British popstar by that name who was
endlessly difficult to take seriously as an adult, a goal he somehow seemed to
long for in the absence of any supporting evidence whatsoever that he would one
day enjoy that reputation. Kindly spread the moniker.

So I've now had a couple days where I got away from the TV and put through some
calls to AusAID Ghana and the Ghana NGO that may have the first Samoan
breadfruit grant in Africa.

12 February 2011 15:34 - Sat - Cairo -
3pm 12 February 2011: whew

Hi All,

So Mubark's ignominious departure Sharm El Sheikh yesterday(?) and his
resignation today are now history.

For me it came yesterday evening in the lounge room of "my"
family when "Vice-President" (for ~10 days) Suleiman announced
Mubarak's resignation. The home of my "brother" Magdy Ibrahim Selim.
I had gone over there to pick up a fat little payment for my flat in that
building. His ~30 year old daughter is buying it with her husband, their two
little daughters home with grandma these days as Hoda has returned to the
working world after the early years of motherhood. Her husband and youngest
brother were at Tahrir when the news of Mubarak's abdication came in the
midsts of the sunset prayers. Boy Wonder (Ahmad - Magdy's son who house-sat my
little flat from when he got married in late 2006 or early 2007 - when I was
back in Canberra 2006-2008 - and continues his climb in the ranks of the
Semirames - Intercontinental Hotel reservations department) had come in from
the next flat with his wife and two little kids and the room just exploded in
joy when Suleiman announced that Mubarak had resigned and left the country in
the hands of the military who will organise new elections. That neighborhood
street was quiet immediately afterwards. People are apprehensive about what all
this means and the "forge onward" enthusiasts seemed, all, to be
downtown demonstrating and will now probably stay all night again tonight and
continue their celebrations.

Last night at our home, Reda wandered as in a trance to the TV as they ran
footage of the helicopter that carried Mubarak from the presidential palace to the
Cairo airport... yesterday(?), that would have been, perhaps. Reda touched her
fingers to the image of the helicopter, following it right to left across the
TV screen as the camera panned to keep sight of it until it disappeared, having
grown smaller and smaller by then, behind the tops of distant
tall buildings. Then she turned and sat down on the lounge and just cried
buckets... the designated successor of Sadat who was murdered for making peace
with Israel... who was the designated successor of Gamal Adbul Nasser who
implemented girls and womens education initiatives and came to her school when
she was a little girl and shook their hands... they all gave her quite a
lot.

It's too bad that the resignation of Mubarak occurred after full daylight. The
video streaming out of Tahrir during daytime was giving such a lovely picture
of well-scrubbed, colourfully dressed, attractive Egyptians of all walks of
life who have joined the "Shabaab" ("a" as in
"fat"), The Youth... a word I had never noticed before which has
been, more and more, respectfully on the tips of tongues for days and days and
days. It would have been nice to have seen them explode in joy in full
sunlight. Collages of still photos we have been seeing on TV, taken in the
darkness of the moments after Mubarak's resignation was announced, make them
all look gaunt and exhausted, which of course those who have been there 15 days
probably would have looked like in sunlight, too.

It was the ~35 year old Google executive, Wael Ghonim, who got all this going
with 14 other people through an anonymous Facebook group:

Known or unkown to him were the preparations of a parallel and
more established youth resistence movement, the 6th of April Youth who had
been planning and executing operations since 2008, perhaps even some of those I
watched from hotel rooftops, not knowing who, exactly, they were:

In any event, the two laid out a successful pattern of action once people in
droves came to Tahrir looking for leadership. And both refused to be called
"leadership" - they both seem to have trusted that once getting days
and days of hundreds and hundreds of thousands of protesters out, things would
take their natural course if their primary demand was the exit of Mubarak.

So we toasted the revolution with tea at "home" and then I left the
Selims to go find Reda who had been at the market through the afternoon and had
taken everything by toktok taxi to her sister, Zuba's.

I took our 22 year old nephew to my carpenter's shop to kind of celebrate the
occassion but everybody over their was stunned to the point of speechlessness.
After a cup of tea we went back to Zuba's to see what Reda wanted to do and she
wanted to get home. We loaded the backpack and motorcycle with the groceries
and putt-putted home. The traffic police had disappeared again... the police
won't be disbanded, perhaps, but they are so detested as to be fearful for
their lives, one would think, in the last couple weeks. One of them shot and
killed somebody up around the Suez Canal's Med entrance yesterday and the whole
town came out and laid siege to the police station until the policeman who had
killed the citizen was, himself, dead somehow. Then the townspeople burned down
the police station, leaving the other policemen to scatter in all directions as
they might... the only story I know of score settling when one might expect
millions more... but Egyptians really just don't overreact violently as a
culture... albeit that generalisation diffuses into traditional systems of
retribution in rural and small town areas that are still solidly or even just
somewhat "tribal". And government relations with the often somewhat
rural populations up towards Gaza and Israel, where the policeman killed and
was himself killed yesterday, are exacerbated by those citizens' desire to help
Palestine - and some are close to Gaza and do help with the smuggling tunnels,
giving hospitality to Palestinians waiting for the Rafah crossing to open...
whatever they can do - and the general "theatre" of Cairo doing what
Israel wants in the joyless reality enforced by America, the American
infatuation with Israel's "experitise" on "security"
issues, the impossibility of achieving security without rights for all, etc. ad
nauseum. Big, ambiguous, can of worms up there, to be sure.

Mubarak held on long enough, or perhaps one could say America and Israel held
on to him well long enough, for 30 years of educational espousement of
cosmopolitan democratic ideals to be firmly ingrained in the Shabaab who really
do know what to do with democracy when given the chance. And instant
messaging will now bring them and others downtown by the millions if the Army
drags its feet.

So this is the end of Halliburton and the American government's
"security" operations in the Middle East. Slowly, their
"rights" based approach at the fore, the Shabaab of the region and
others will lead an effort to throw back American militarism (but not America
itself), contain Israel, and dismantle Israel's evil settlement project on the
West Bank. I imagine Europe and others will help a great deal if the American
government doesn't insist on getting in the way.

The Shabaab and the others are still downtown dancing for the joy of
the day they were born.

In all the world the Cry of the Village is the same
"Do you see the Beauty of my people?
Do you know the Wonder of my land?
Can you imagine the Dreams in my heart for my children?
Come sit with me and let us speak!
Let us speak of what we might do together,
before that time our Creator,
calls us to ask what we have done
with our Day in the Sun."

The Mystic of Kilimanjaro

From our 5000 year old village
Death count "0"
Jeff
Pyramids, Egypt
"Mabruk Masr" - they're saying it to each other -
"Congratulations Egypt"

The barriers around Pyramids were hardly manned after the
first five or six days of the Revolution, as escaped prisoners from area
prisons had dissipated from or into our environs where they as well as local
trouble-makers, where such existed, decided not to engage in mischief at such a
time as this. Certainly it was five or six days before Mubarak resigned that I
passed through my last barrier and it was in "my" neighborhood (Tersa
Street at Ezzadin Omar (Al Arish)).

A tall thin man of 30 or 35 years waved me over and was a little taken aback
when I took off my helmet and he saw that I was a Europoid.

I thought I would try my drivers license first, with which he was further taken
aback.

"You live close to here!" he said in only lightly accented English.
It still has the Tersa-Omda area address

"Yes," I said. "I live close to here."

"And you were born in 1949!!!"

"Yes," I said. "In 1949."

"You don't look..."

"Well, if you have oily skin when you're young, when you get
older..."

He burst into laughter, waved me on and took some steps backward, his face
falling into his hands in mirth. Perhaps his mother had once said it the same
way as mine.

Reports are that the Army is aiming for elections in 6 months but
that Shabaab representatives are talking to them now and asking for
9.

19 February 2011 04:01 - Sunset on Obama's
day in the sun

I went downtown for about five hours yesterday. It was the
first time I had been down there since doing some wi-fi work at Assim's hotel
on the same day that Mubarak's regime shut down the Internet in the evening.

A few moments ago I finished sending the following comment to a raft
of American, Australian, Egyptian and Israeli newspapers:

To the Editor:

In reference to "U.S. Blocks Security Council Censure of Israeli
Settlements", NYT Friday 18 February, I am reminded of Ecclesiastes 1:9 What
has been is what will be, and what has been done is what will be done; there is
nothing new under the sun.

On the other hand, I was wandering the environs of Liberation Square in Cairo
on that day, and - as a foreigner - politely staying at least 500 yards away.
But even well far from the epicenter of the celebrations, I was rubbing
shoulders with the hundreds of thousands or perhaps some million or two
Egyptians in the environs. There were parents with small children too young to
remember, later in life, that they were there that day, the parents' cameras
capturing the evidence for them that they were.

Then I came home to Pyramids suburb where, after a long winter's nap, I woke up
to the news of Obama's veto of the UN Security Council settlements resolution.

The senses have had a certain acuity during the dangers and exhilaration of the
Egyptian Revolution and on the heels of that I suppose I shall never forget the
contrast, today, in what the Egyptians have done with their Day in the Sun and
what Obama has done with his.

Downtown I was uplifted. With word of the settlements veto I was revolted.

As I was when I left America for good in 2004, I am still of the opinion that
the greatest threat to American decency and security is Israel and the American
Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC).

The contrast between what America was doing with my tax money and what the new
government of Egypt will be doing with it brings a certain sense of solace.

Thank you for your time,

Jeffrey C. Marck

18 March 2011 12:00-Fri - This week in Egypt

Talk of Hamas and PLO rapprochement was vague but consistent
through the week... and Netanyahu's trying to turn the spotlight towards the
Iranian nuclear program, as usual. I don't think the new Egyptian government is
going to have much to do with the PLO and will be opening up the Gaza crossing
and dealing directly with the elected government of Palestine - Hamas.

So Netanyahu looks like a smaller and smaller writhing dag
for the moment, America going on and on and on, filtering all they do through
AIPAC.

Hillary was in town this week... but as I've said before, "There were no
feasts in Cairo when Hillary was nominated Sec State." She was politely
received but I don't think the new government here will looking to America for
"Middle East" momentum.

The interim government already announced that the
scandalously low prices Israel pays for Egyptian natural gas is under review...
a bit gleefully because the graft that was presumed the source of very low
prices Israel pays has been exposed and it was Mubarak's son who personally
walked away with some millions or dozens of millions when the deal was made.

Today, Egypt woke up to the happy news that the Security Council approved a
no-fly zone for Libya.

Al Jazeera English
had carried a rambling speech live by Ghaddafy late yesterday evening saying
the conquest of Benghazi would occur overnight - house to house.

I had had the AusAID application for Samoan breadfruit to West Africa to
complete and transmit to Pretoria for Tues and then Tues, overnight copy
editing for a translation service client and then the same thing for another on
Weds night - my sleep was out of whack right up to last night when I went to
bed at 11, I think, and then I went off to bed with Ghaddfay's words ringing in
my ears... fearing they might be true.

But Ghaddafy's troops didn't enter Benghazi overnight and now, perhaps, they
never will. There was footage of the joyful Benghazi masses dancing in their
town square and, a vivid memory to me, a older-middle aged man in very tribal
dress speaking perfect English and beaming ear to ear thanking the outside
world, mentioning America first... it had been many years since I had heard an
Arab thanking America for anything.

There was much to celebrate in Egypt this week, too. The Army, The Youth and
other trusted revolutionaries hammered out the constitutional amendments that
will be voted on tomorrow.

That arm of Interior that was most despised - 100,000 secret police - was
dissolved this week and they are now all officially unemployed.

The issue was forced through events in the far south, southeast of Cairo over
the last couple weeks. In Helwan... a separate Governate ("province",
or, as with Cairo, Giza, 6th of October City and Helwan, a city so huge it is,
administratively, a province/governate).

There had simply been no police since some days before Mubarak fled to Sharm El
Sheikh. They had just killed what was then known to be at least 350
revolutionaries and were totally discredited on the world stage. The Health
Department is now documenting what may be as many as 500 such murders because
police were using standover tactics in the hospital morgues through those days,
forcing the doctors to submit autopsy reports giving false causes of deaths for
many of the people so slain. But the doctors, in the main, filled out but
refused to sign those false reports so the initial round of adding more police
murders to the history of those days involves the fairly simple task of going
through the certificates of death from those days and scrutinising those that
don't have drs' signatures. Then there is to be another round, or perhaps
somewhat in concert with the first, of examining all deaths due to trauma from
those days that do have drs' signatures, added to the process of
community members arriving to the responsible public records offices to make
sure members of their family murdered by the police in those days are actually
on the list of murders by the police from those days. The final tally will
probably be fairly complete as those various methods of working backwards
through it are pursued. And of course the health care professionals are very
anxious to do that after being forced at gun point to develop those false
records in the first place.

So nobody wanted the police back.

But then some weeks ago now a church was
razed by fire in Helwan and Christian youth took to the streets in protest
and the Muslim youth came out to protest the protest (it only takes one bad egg
to burn down a church). It all got fierce because there were no police to
separate the two groups, and 13 people were killed, about half Christian and
half Muslim. The army did well in ending the violence over what seemed a couple
days but then came the public realisation/acceptance that there would be more
such situations developing if there was no return to normal officer presence...
the Army people not able to operate as quickly - chain of command - or as
knowledgeably - in terms of knowing the neighborhoods and their issues. So
about that time the traffic police were suddenly back but it seemed to be just
them for the moment. Then there was a continuing simmering and flaring of the
situation in Helwan and I think the police were ordered or requested back to
normal duties by the Army.

So then there was that "what police" question in everybody's face and
within a few days news - midweek, this week - that the "security"
police were no more and those employed as such are now simply out of a job.
They've gone off the payroll. Perhaps some fraction of the 100,000 people
involve will be absorbed into other Interior units but maybe not. Any
action by the Army to legitimise anything out of Interior is viewed with
enormous suspicion.

So other big news would probably start with the scheduled referendum for
Saturday, 19 March - tomorrow - to approve the constitutional amendments. Reda,
my wife, says the vote is on and she will be voting but there is the following
datelined yesterday in AlMasry AlYoum (The Egyptian Day):

Some 2000 judges have threatened not to participate in the
supervision of the 19 March constitutional referendum, citing procedural
irregularities in the selection of judges.

The announcement comes as the Supreme Judicial Committee
supervising the referendum urged all citizens to cast their votes in the poll
on Saturday.

The judges threatening to boycott the referendum claim the
committee used “favoritism” in choosing certain judges to supervise particular
polling stations.

They also said the committee chose 52 judges who happen not
to be working in Egypt, in addition to another 47 who are dead.

They further said the committee did not regard the principle
of “seniority” in its selection of the judges.

So, a bit fuzzy around the edges for the moment. There is,
however, now an Army internet page showing the polling places so it seems to be
going ahead.

Distressingly, the Army is now doing the same kind of stuff as the police once
they have people in custody. The following is also from The Egyptian Day:

Civilians who were detained by the military last week gave
testimonials on Wednesday recounting the torture that they endured and saying
that thousands of innocent individuals remain in military custody.

Families of detainees, some of whom received military sentences
while others remain in detention with no charges brought, tearfully pleaded for
their release.

Rasha Azab, a journalist who was detained on 9 March, said
during the press conference that the people remaining in military prisons went
on a hunger strike on Wednesday in protest at the abuses they have been
subjected to.

Human Rights lawyers condemned the prosecution of civilians
in military courts and the military's torture practices and called for public
pressure for the release of the detained.

These were, I think, the two or four thousand people
arrested early in the week who wouldn't leave Liberation (Tahrir) Square... who
wanted everything "right now" and wanted to keep the square
shut down to traffic 24/7 until they got it.

I'm not, actually, sympathetic towards those small thousands arrested - the
routine is that one engages in civil disobedience, one gets arrested, and one's
cause is promoted by the publicity, etc. There will be one million perhaps out
again today as there will every Friday into the weeks and months ahead. One day
a week is proving to be enough to keep the ball rolling for the moment.

But it's just amazing to me that they would be tortured by the Army and... some
of them... already sentenced to 5 years in prison by military kangaroo courts.
So the Army Supreme Command has some new issues about its credibility which
developed, one would hope, from the Army's insufficient instructions to and
supervision of their people "on the ground." Certainly the
convictions will be judged basic habius corpus violations as the Army
has no power to try civilians... and the pendulum is already swinging the other
way - there was enormous reaction to all that.

So, in the shadow of Libya's civil war and Bahrain's use of foreign troops to
subjugate and murder its own citizens, those are some of the highlights for the
week from Egypt.

There was sizeable Friday gathering at Liberation Square (Tahrir) for the first
time in three weeks. A news report - English newspaper web site, I think,
rather than TV - spoke of tens of thousands. But I don't find anything in the
online newspapers mentioning it tonight.

There's a piece about three weeks of Sudanese protests at the UN High
Commission for Refugees and its closure on Thursday due to increasing
aggression towards UN staff:

I think of the Sudanese as having a special status and I noticed something
about this recently - certain jobs that are closed to all foreigners except
Sudanese. I remember them protesting in 2005 as there was a persistent rumour
in their community that the UN would give them passports "good
anywhere", etc. The protests got more and more viral and the police
stepped in. The press, at the time, discretely avoided mentioning that, as the
above reports, "police ... killed at least 23 people, including
children" at that time.

News about protests over the ignorant, hick-rascist pastor in Florida burning
the Koran - UN personnel attacked in Afghanistan and seven killed:

"Head of Egypt's ruling Supreme Council of the Armed Forces Hussein
Tantawi will meet with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas on Thursday to
discuss efforts to reconcile Fateh and Hamas, Palestine's two leadership
groups, said Egyptian diplomatic sources on Saturday:"

Oh, here's the online report about Friday's protests mentioning "tens
of thousands" (in Egypt as a whole) whose key demand was immediately
prosecution of Mubarak for his very long list of crimes. A good long article in
The Daily News Egypt where The Egyptian Day (AlMasry AlYoum)had nothing I could find:

"We came here to complete our revolution by bringing corrupt figures to
court, to fully remove the regime by discharging governors and disbanding local
councils," said Amr Masoud, a physician. :

Whew... my eyes are going buggy with the small print they use. I wrote the
following household report earlier (good-night):

On the family news side, Reda just walked in and told me to say hello to all of
you.

About the time I met Reda - two years ago on the 15th of this month - there was
a young bloke talking to me about a series of photographic expeditions of a
week or so each that would take us to some of the far places around Egypt - the
Mediterranean coast, the northwestern oases, and certain places around the Red
Sea, the Gulf of Aqaba and Sinai for which, I, the photographer, would be paid
well (but not handsomely).

The schedule came to change through the planning stages as I came to have plans
to marry and we took stock of when Reda would be able to take time off and
where she wanted to go as she would be able to accompany us and some of her
expenses would be absorbed by the project.

Then the young bloke started drinking again and I heard nothing more from him.
But a Pacific Islander dictionary project (the data entry, the computer
processing, the typesetting) came my way and kind of saved us for most of the
rest of the year.

About a year ago, as I recall, I had been named Director for East Africa in a
government contracting newsletter service that was starting up. I left that
outfit when the director made disparagingly comments to me in a staff meeting.
I walked out three times and didn't come back the third. He emailed
apologetically some months later and said they couldn't solve the problems he
was so impatient about, either, and they gave up the start up.

So that was just as well but there was no dictionary project that came to the
rescue in 2010. It was just kind of a tough year. I went on board with the
translation service furthest southwest in Greater Cairo - the closet to our
flat - which actually does little translation work and never, in that year,
brought in a single English copy editing job longer than a page or two. But I
did condensations of Dickens and Shakespeare for school children and it's just
as well I read Tale of Two Cities which certainly helped me think about
avoiding capricious dangers during the Egyptian Revolution.

I remember, too, starting up a Teaching English as a Foreign Language
correspondence course and losing 5 kg due to stress. I'm not kind of plagued by
the memory or something and hadn't thought about it for about 6 months. The
course assumed a certain amount of training or experience in teaching and I
haven't any of either and it was eating up a terrific amount of time in a
situation where I wasn't make much even when I was working full time. I cut
bait after eight or ten weeks. Just as well. I got some tutoring students
through my web site before, during and after, and they were, in the main,
shocked when I gave them homework and expected them to do it, and dissatisfied
when they found out they would not be progressing very rapidly when the only
effort they made was to have weekly or twice weekly tutorials. And I couldn't
count on their keeping to schedule because they were so often business people
out of town a great deal - and often didn't telephone in advance to say they
wouldn't be in town. So I was declining to continue with some of them. I had a
bit of a chat with someone who tried their hand at it, too, and gave it away as
well.

At about that time the owner of the translation service came home from a
pilgrimage to Mecca and could not pay his staff. I'd like to say I told him to
call me when he could, but I stuck with it albeit with regular time off to
cultivate stronger relations with translation services in the more upscale
commercial districts of Giza (in Dokki and Mohandeseen) which sent me little
work to begin with. But I expected that as they had said they would have to
market the "native English speakers final copyediting" and see what
happened. All three came good by the end of the year and I'm glad I didn't go
out looking for more because just the three were enough to keep me busy from
around the first of December.

Then came the revolution and business dipped a little but came back strongly in
March.

At the same time there was this Pacific Island breadfruit varieties for
tropical Africa activity and the sudden news, about the time the revolution
started, that we were being encouraged to apply to a grant category with a $1
million limit in the context of much expanded Australian AusAID largesse to
Africa. So the Ghana group that was coming to envisage a co-application with
Sierra Leone just left it in my hands and we expanded the request to one of
27,000 little starter trees for "the coastal nations of West Africa from
Senegal to Cameroon."

We find out as early as this week where we stand with that. As a practical
matter the first fiscal year of the grant would involve just the Phase 1 Ghana
and Sierra Leone plantings and the other seven national or international
projects would have partners identified for activities beginning only in the
second financial year of the two year grant. And the Ghana and Sierra Leone
projects would just be starting Phase 2. So if I were in AusAid West Africa's
shoes, I would be funding just Ghana and Sierra Leone to begin with and asking
us to reapply next year for the other seven where we report our experiences in
the first two.

Anyway, I'm just not, in the main, making phone calls to friends or family
until we hear from them. I imagine babbling on about nothing else if I did.

Meanwhile, the Hunger Alliance of Ghana (HAG), the AusAID applicant, has made
me their Chief Consultant and part of my income is out of their income from
convening the new Ghana Parliament Hunger Caucus so I've been named Chief
Consultant to the caucus as well.

So now I'm making the $24,000 a year I noticed that native English speakers
with a BA can usually make around town when just looking for work and not
necessarily a career. But, I'm making it at a much-less-than-full-time
appointment as people were so happy with the breadfruit proposal. About which
the Breadfruit Institute is just kind of amazed... asking me never to drop "Breadfruit
Institute Volunteer and Liaison to Africa" from my letterhead, web site,
etc.

They had no one to kind of put three to six months into developing a safe place
to start ("safe" in the sense of probable plant survival) and now
we're just all holding our breath for the coming days. They had no one with any
Africa background to conceptualise a project and approach NGOs and help them
with grant applications. So there I was with my African rural economies BA and
43 years of reading larger and smaller scraps of Africa news from the
perspective of actually having been there and imagining fairly well what the
story was on about. And 7 years with Jack Caldwell's African population health
unit in Canberra. So all the mega trends and many of the national trends were
more or less known to me up until 1999 and I was able to jump into it after a
little catching up.

AusAID is different than any other aid agency in the sense that they most or
all of them seem to know a lot about breadfruit and food security from their
Pacific Island experiences... it's part of the ministry's corporate culture and
they seem to know about it even if they haven't personally worked in the
islands. I ran into an Australian diplomat on the Metro and he didn't need
convinced at all. The Yanks and Europeans just kind of stare blankly past me
when the subject comes up, like, "What's this... why haven't I heard of
this?" - - - Australia's definitely the place to start.

I had my first scheduling conflict this last week. HAG and one of my commercial
clients wanted me to do about 20 hours of work each with only three days left
in the week. Ultimately, I confessed to HAG that I was overbooked, so they cut
me a little slack and then the commercial client was too busy with other things
on Thursday to give me instructions for the weekend and suddenly my problems
were gone. My first HAG project is history. It went off to them at about 4 pm
Saturday.

I had asked HAG to officially put me on the payroll 1 April as I didn't know
what I would be able to do for them before that, but also as a little personal
joke on myself, looking back on where I was at this time of the year in 2010
and 2009.

So we're looking forward to life on my new salary just as Reda's salary ends -
15 April which is both her birthday and the day we first met. What she did/does
with her salary I can only guess. She allowed me the dignity of supporting the
household completely - she stretched whatever little bit I brought home - her
salary hadn't gone for that. I just assumed it was going for her nephew,
Mahmoud's, undergraduate fees at the very nice technology institute he attends.

But her gold from the wedding was, I began to notice, absent from view by about
early summer last year.

Some month or two after I began to notice that - at our Ramadan gathering with
her cousin Assim's side of the family that I wrote about before (the fake
inquisition) - she and Assim and I were the only three at a four person table
for a few moments and I took her right hand in mine, lifted it up and with my
left hand I pushed her right blouse sleeve down towards her elbow and asked,
"Fein el dahab?" (Where's the gold?) She made talk about it
being at home and Assim said, "That's what they all say. Hannan (his wife)
will keep asking for things I don't think are wise and after I get tired of
hearing about it I get her gold and tell her, 'Do what you want with it.'
They're all the same. And they know you will be ashamed if they don't have any
gold so then you give them more again."

I never mentioned it to Reda again. But then in the weeks before the Revolution
began I noticed she was wearing it again and mentioned it to her. She smiled
brightly and fled the room. I mentioned it to Assim some days later.
"What?" he said. "The gold," I said. "What she got
from me when you took us before the wedding. She has the same gold back. The
same pieces. She must have taken it to someone for money and then took the
money back to them and got the gold back." "Good!" he said.
"That means.... well it means you're a lucky man. They're not all like
that... now she'll never... You're a lucky man."

"It disappeared about the time they renovated their mosque and they put
badaghaz (natural gas pipeline) into all the apartments."

"The same gold... is back?"

"Yes."

"You're a lucky man."

And now it's gone again, "Hiding it because of all the escaped
prisoners" is said to be the reason why. Maybe it's true.

They seem to have effectively put off her nephew Mahmoud's "request"
for an expensive car or motorcycle so it's not that. I don't know what it is.
Or if it is. I allow myself the dignity of pretending I'm not curious
and her the dignity of not being cross-examined.

The night Mubarak resigned that I went out looking for Mahmoud and took him
with me to our carpenter's shop. Assim and all his friends talk about how
difficult it is to get finished work out of Ashraf and I never understood why
they put up with it. But it turns out they are all childhood friends. They all
grew up together when Assim was young and their father had them in school in
Cairo while he stayed on the Red Sea coast where he was involved with
construction projects long before the building boom of the last few decades.
And to which Assim and his siblings went for the summer every year. So he and
the other blokes that have taken me in to their lives all grew up together.
Still, until now, he lives just 10 minutes on a bus from these other guys'
shops and homes.

"You shouldn't be mad at Ashraf," Assim said to me one night, some
weeks ago, translating to Ashraf as we had tea at Ashraf's shop
("mad" concerning the 15 months it took Ashraf to finish my office
desk and book shelves - or rather not finishing them but releasing them to me
unfinished because I had prepared a letter to the police concerning the matter).
Only with the Revolution did I appreciate how much an Egyptian might dread any
contact with the police.

"Assim isn't very smart," continued Assim. "He just wants to be
friends." - translating again to Ashraf who, not looking downcast or
anything, went to nodding "No, I'm not very smart" and then
"Yes, I just want to be friends." Not very smart but enormously
gifted in his craft.

I was a bit flush for some reason and the cafe's man had just arrived with a
delivery of five or six cups of tea. I forget exactly how many of us there
were, but they were all of this childhood mates mob. I pulled out 100 pounds
(~$16) - I was accepting this little bit of further knowledge about the group
as part of their continuing opening up of their group towards me. They had
never let me pay for tea - still the guest more than 2 years after I got back
and most of 2 years since I married one of their "sisters". I held
the LE100 out to Ashraf and said, "Take this... for tea." At 50
piastres per cup for two years... probably I owed the group that much.

Well, the tea man grabbed the whole LE100 and the place exploded in laughter,
they all just about died. Ashraf was keen to have the LE100 but, as was
explained to me later, he owed the tea man LE300 and the tea man was suddenly
in a position to grab some of it and he did. Ashraf, went on howling in
frustration, the other men went on howling with laughter. It couldn't have been
a more hysterical rite a little deeper into their lives. And people love
Ashraf. He doesn't even lock the roll-down door when he leaves for the night.
Granted it would be a noisy project for someone to try to open it in the real
stillness of these neighborhoods in the middle of most nights. Except in summer
when children sleep all day and play in the street all night. And wedding -
which are as noisy as they want as late as they want.

It was kind of a rite of passage when I took Mahmoud to Ashraf's shop to be
with the men the night Mubarak resigned. The first time we had ever gone out to
do anything together that didn't involve requests from his mother or Reda. Only
people acknowledged as adults by their families were out and about that night
in our neighborhoods except some distance into our barrios where the children
were out on the street playing as usual. But as I wrote of that night
previously, the men at Ashraf's shop were dumbstruck. They were drinking tea
but there was no conversation and Mahmoud and I didn't wait for the next round
of tea before going back to his mother's flat.

Assim called me last night and asked that we meet at the office of a certain
very rich private school owner with whom he is friends... a place he had taken
me too several times before and I drove over there. Mahmoud was with Assim and
I've noticed Assim taking him around recently since he (Assim) got a car,
acknowledging Mahmoud as an adult.

I was a bit shocked most of two years ago when Reda was tearful and just
howling when Zuba called again and again through the night saying Mahmoud
wasn't home yet. He was twenty years old at the time and it was the first night
he hadn't spent at home. He's had a pretty tough row to hoe at times. And again
tonight or last night there was phone call after phone call because Mahmoud
wasn't home by midnight. "He's 22," I said to Reda. "He can do
what he wants." But Zuba and Reda are just utterly preoccupied at such
times.

So I write for Mahmoud. Something for him later in life about what these years
were to me as he rather quickly, now, is speaking a lot more English and we can
converse in more detail about the things swirling about us.

So these young revolutionaries have pretty good timing. They gave it a rest the
Fridays two and three weeks ago but they had a very large gathering at
Liberation Square (Tahrir) again last Friday specifically demanding that
Mubarak and his sons be committed to detention and now they all are except
Mubarak himself who is under armed guard in hospital and facing detention when
he gets out:

CAIRO: Egypt's prosecutor general announced Wednesday the
15-day detention of the country's former president, pending inquiries into
accusations of corruption and abuse of authority in an unprecedented
investigation of a former ruler in the Arab world.

The announcement was the latest in a dramatic series of events
surrounding the probes against top former regime officials, and came just hours
after former President Hosni Mubarak, 82, was hospitalized with heart problems
in the Red Sea resort of Sharm el-Sheikh.

Dozens of people marched in the streets of 6th of October,
west of Cairo, Wednesday, after hearing news that former President Hosni
Mubarak and his sons are to be detained for 15 days.

They marched around al-Hosari Square, raising Egyptian
flags.

Mubarak and his two sons, Gamal and Alaa Mubarak, face
investigations on corruption charges. The former president is suspected of
being involved in decisions to shoot at pro-democracy protesters during the 25
January revolution.

Thousands of demonstrators had protested in Tahrir Square on
Friday, calling for prosecution of the Mubaraks and other former regime
officials.

Reda had gone to the southeast suburb/city of Helwan on Tues
to do more of her retirement paperwork (she retires Thurs so I'll be at her
office through most of the day, too). And Tues I had gone downtown to get my
last 3 month visa. By the end of the month I will have my Ghana contract to
show them - my main income is from abroad - I don't need or want a work permit
anymore - and then they will give me a 3 year multiple entry visa. But Tues
Tahrir was packed with demonstrators again and I called Reda, who was done with
her business and had downtown business for Weds as well, and we stayed at her
cousin cum brother Assim's little hotel, Assim regaling all there, as usual.

We got going at 8am and it was a half hour early for Immigration to be open so
I got a nice Yank cuppa at McD's and walked around Tahrir Square, seeing for
the first time the parts of the sidewalks the demonstrators tore to pieces with
their bare hands and with pieces of steel from fences and gates... mining the
footpaths for stone to throw at the police who were killing them.

I went to Window 30 ("Residence - non-Arab Passport") as I always do.
They sent me to Window 12 ("Tourist Visa") as they always do. Window
12 sent me back to Window 30, as they always do and Window 30 was set to send
me back to Window 12 when I said in Arabic, "My wife's Egyptian. They say
I should come here." Then I showed a picture of Reda and a colour photo of
her and colour photocopy of her passport and everything was over in about 3
minutes, a rattling conversation ensuing about why we live in the city of
generals (because Central Remaya is there and my wife works there) - and
the fact that there are no street names out here - just building numbers and
flat number - and then I came home again. To mountains of work for the Ghana
NGO and parliamentary caucus and a heap of work from a commercial client. I
just got done at 6 or 7 this morning and slept until 4pm. And now I am free,
until Sunday, to think great thoughts about hunger in tropical Africa. There's
a certain kind of non-degree granting Danish school for young adults that was
instrumental in bringing literacy and good civic mindedness to rural youth
after serfdom was abandoned in about 1850... and the Ghanaians are quite
curious.

Oh, here's a piece on the Tuesday Tahrir protest that blocked access to
Immigration - a continuous holdover from last Friday that finally saw the
Mubarak's detained:

NATO bumbles along in Libya protecting "civilians only"... but one
might hope...

The French have outlawed the veil in public and the first day it was in force
there were thousands of women who hit the French streets wearing full veils in
public. But our local English language papers aren't reporting that anything
more happened last night or through the day.

Let's see... Mubarak got arrested and the value of the Egyptian pound started
going up for the first time in yonks.

I have culled the papers daily for any good news for Palestine and generally
find none. Little news on Palestine at all. It will be time before there is a
government in place that makes what I hope will be monumental changes in
Egypt's relationship with Israel and Palestine. A kind of aside is that Gamal
Mubarak is now known to have personally walked away with over $150 million upon
the signing of the cut-rate-natural-gas-for-Israel agreement of several years
ago. I think it was in 2005 or 2006 when I was here in Cairo. Or perhaps it was
2006 or 2007 when I was back in Canberra and reading about it online. I
wondered at the time who's hands got greased on that one at it turns out to
have been Mubarak's son, Gamal (the "smart" one).

The news in the last week is more and more about "blood". Blood that
was shed. And the blood that will now be demanded of the leaders of the old regime.
Mubarak and his sons are in detention and... first things first... they are
apparently going to immediately face murder charges for their activities during
the revolution and there is a prevailing nuance in the press that this may
result in death sentences for all of them.

The "final" report on regime murders during the revolution came out
yesterday and puts the total at 846 with 6467 injured/wounded.

Al Ahram, the semi-official English version at least, that I so admired for
their "opinion" on America with respect to Israel and Palestine (cf.,
www.americansincairo.org) is now
in the process of frantically digging itself out of the hole they dug for
themselves with respect to their, granted-compulsory, failure to report and
opinionate on civil rights and political freedoms in the last decade and more.
Something can be captured of their current transition in their main reports
this morning:

The other English language on-line dailies have similar takes on yesterday's
release of the fact finding commission and this "Battle of the
Camels" is especially held up as an example of the Mubarks' personal
culpabilities and the dire consequences for the demonstrators in those days
before the army was actually intervening:

CAIRO: The official fact-finding mission investigating the death toll of
Egypts revolution released on Tuesday its final report, saying that at least
846 were killed and 6,467 injured during the popular uprising that toppled the
Egyptian regime and forced president Hosni Mubarak to step down in February.

According to a 30-page summary of the 400-page report, the revolution also....

including, that the Salafis are abandoning their "obedience to
authority" here and in other countries, now that they won't get thrown in
prison, and have weighed in on yet another ridiculous Egyptian
Christian>Muslim/Muslim>Christian conversion saga:http://www.almasryalyoum.com/en/node/406490

and AlMasry AlYoum has the most detailed report of the continuing repercussions
of the Armed Forces Supreme Command dismissing what seems dozens of governate
(state/province) governors, and their dreary decision to replace them,
entirely, with "new" members of the armed forces and police/security
services (i.e., all the past governors have always been appointed by the
president or something, they have always been career military or security
people and the AFSC is in the process of dismissing heaps of them, only to
replace them with "new" career military or security people - and Qena
Governate is the only one is which these august decisions have been protested
vigorously):

CAIRO: Egypt will send a security team to the Gaza Strip to
help implement a reconciliation agreement reached by rival Palestinian groups
Fatah and Hamas, an Egyptian security source told Reuters on Thursday.

Restructuring and unifying security forces in Hamas-run Gaza
is a key condition for the success of the accord, brokered by Egypt on
Wednesday to overcome a rift that had stifled a Palestinian drive for
independence.

"An Egyptian security delegation will head to Gaza to
help settle and organise the internal security situation there, now that the
reconciliation agreement is finally in place," said the security source,
who declined to be identified.....

Other newspapers around the world were in the main concerned
with the royal wedding in UK. Two billion people following it on TV already
this morning... my wife included... utterly rapt... I tried to make
conversation but she seems to have hung out the "Do Not Disturb"
sign.

If there is any one thing that soon brings the millions back to Tahrir of a
Friday, it will certainly be the "trials" of civilians in military
kangaroo courts:http://www.almasryalyoum.com/en/node/414434
The Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF) don't really seem to understand
where they are in space and time (and weren't selected by Mubarak, as the
individual members were appointed over the years, because they were great,
independent thinkers).

I went back to my www.americansincairo.org
website for the first time since the revolution and see I last updated in
October of last year as I had, sort of quarterly for about 5 years). It had
presented nothing more or less than a chronicle of Al-Ahram
"semi-official" opinion that had, for years and years, been deadly
accurate about the utter senselessness of American positions on Palestine, why
they were doomed, how long it would take them to fall apart, how they
conflicted with rights-based approaches, etc. ad nauseam through decades when
Mubarak was polite enough not to personally point out this stuff himself.
Whatever Al-Ahram's domestic coverage, it would have been nice if the
American presidents had been strapped into straight-jackets every Friday
morning and been made to listen to someone read the stuff I linked if only for
posterity.

I clicked forward, forward, forward from October and found that the old issues
are still retrievable up to the last issue of 2010. They apparently elected not
to continue to disclose, from the first week of January, being so oblivious to
the upcoming storm of 25 January and onward.

These days their daily news "hot links" on page one are dominated by
news of the national and international football scene as they cast about for a
new image in their "real" reporting.

Digging through the week's reporting by all the English on-line papers for some
notion of how life goes on in revolutionary Egypt for this last week, I link
the following piece on Qena, the only governate (state/province) with the
hutzpah to protest the replacement of the old governor, appointed by Mubarak
due to his stellar military/police career, by another, appointed by the Supreme
Council of the Armed Forces for his stellar military/police career: http://www.thedailynewsegypt.com/egypt/qena-residents-divided-on-fridays-million-man-march.html

The news from Bahrain was simply awful through the day yesterday. The
government seems to have spent the week demolishing a lot of Shia mosques (as
long as the Saudi army is there and they can do what they want), the Yank
government (with its navy base there) saying nothing. Interviews with Bahrain
hospital workers were broadcast by Al Jazeera detailing their detention and
torture upon the beginning of the protests... forcing them to sign documents
they had not read... presumably denials of receiving patients with gunshot
wounds, etc.

There were more shooting deaths of Syrian protesters yesterday despite Assad's
grant pronouncement that the army had orders to quit shooting the protesters.

Tomorrow is the anniversary of the 1948 Nakba and East Jerusalem and other
flash points are heating up:

Back to yesterday's, Tahrir events... secular groups in Cairo had been
calling for a day of Christian/Muslim solidarity in the aftermath of another
church burning and 12 deaths (6 and 6) when Salafis, accompanied or infiltrated
by thugs with guns, marched on a church where a certain woman (rumoured to
being there and held captive in the church) who seems to have converted to
Islam so she could get divorced (there is neither civil marriage nor civil
divorce in Egypt, essentially - one gets married in church or mosque and, if
Muslim, divorced according to Sharia (but there is no divorce allowed in the
main Christian denominations here)). So Salafis marched on the church, the
thugs started the church on fire and a gun battle erupted between the thugs
with the Christians defending the church... Christians in general taking to arming
themselves for lack of intervention by security forces when thugs or gangs of
Muslim youth start shooting at them. This is the first time thugs have shown up
with Salafis anywhere.

If there is impunity, as there usually is when Muslims attack Christians, it
doesn't bode well for the fate of the Christians during through the coming
months of the interim regime, the thugs now provocateurs trying to get the
populace to clamour for the old regime when Christians were "safer"
and riot of any kind broken up faster.

There has been no report in the news outlets of whether the Salafis solicited
participation by thugs or if the thugs, under pay of rich sympathisers of the
former regime, paid them to watch for such opportunities and spread chaos. No
"findings" yet by the interim regime's analysis of the events of that
day. They were hired guns when part of the "security" apparatus and
now they've shifted to these kinds of activities. In neither the old regime nor
the present interim situation have they been held to account.

The dozens of Salafi satellite TV channels are now freer to comment on politics
but there is the strange mix of their financing... generally wealthy Saudi and
Gulf individuals... they have no other economic basis... which refrained from
dissent/criticism and preached or implied obedience to the regimes (in which
the billionaires who finance the various channels had great interest) and what
they now see as an opportunity to dominate politics in Free Egypt and impose
stricter Sharia, the source of all law presently (it is stated in the present
constitution).

Cooler heads will prevail in the long run, given the general demographics, but
the Salafis do constitute a force to be reckoned with for the moment, coming as
they are, from illiterate migrants from Upper Egypt and the Delta (who feel
like they are living in sin city) through a broad range of income and
generations of residence in Cairo all the way up to highly educated
professionals who simply never stepped out of the mould of mosques (usually
small) obedient to the mosque's head imam, who they address and refer to as
"Sheikh This-or-That"... the sheikhs having strong informal knowledge
of and cooperations with others of their ilk... enough to "hijack"
Tahrir yesterday in any event - the Youth having actually called for a
Muslim-Christian solidarity day, wanting, essentially, to chastise the Salafi
for marching on the Imbaba church mentioned above. So the first big
pro-Palestine day at Tahrir has that dark cloud hanging over it and that should
be kept in mind as the Palestine issue unfolds, the convoy to Gaza, involving
general participation and not a specifically Salafi initiative, also being
hijacked by the Salafi to some extent through association with a sort of launch
from Tahrir yesterday.

So that is to take some of the news reports and commentary at face value.
Viewing the video streams from Tahrir yesterday and the news agency photos of
Tahrir today, I actually see few bearded men in galabea (the Salafi
"trademarks") so maybe it isn't as bad as all that, the people with
Palestinian flags for the day coming from all walks of life and not wanting to
miss the first large pro-Palestinian day, the news agencies themselves, by
Thursday, reporting that a great pro-Palestinian gathering was the theme for
Friday more than they were announcing the Muslim-Christian solidarity theme.

Anyway, the pro-Palestinian Muslim Brotherhood and Salafi groups brought in the
biggest PA system for the day and held the stage.

CAIRO: Egypt's decision to permanently open its border crossing with
Hamas-ruled Gaza starting on Saturday signals an adjustment in its foreign
policy that will boost the group despite Israeli objections.

The decision was first announced in April after Hamas signed a deal with its
rival Fatah led by Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas in the West Bank, ending
a four-year rift that led to Egypt's closure of the Rafah crossing in 2007.

The crossing, where the Egyptians have eased passage since a deadly Israeli
raid on a ship carrying aid to Gaza last May, will as of Saturday allow passage
both ways between 0700 GMT and 1500 GMT every day expect Fridays.

People under 18 or older than 40 will require only a visa to pass, but those
between 18 and 40 will still need security clearance, crossing officials
say....

Egyptian English language newspapers are rather cautiously reporting about an
Israeli citizen now being held for 15 days for investigation of, amongst other
things, having been involved in an evening of Copt-Muslim tensions that left 12
dead:

A great aspect of Egypt that has suffered in the revolution is its industry,
optimism and enthusiasm. Some days it seems like everyone I see is stressed,
stretched or ruined.

Growth July 2010 to June 2011 is expected to come in at "2.6%", the
25 January Revolution halting the accustomed to 5 and 6% growth in its tracks.
But the neighborhoods are busy again with construction projects, the main
thoroughfares of Faisal and Pyramids are getting busier day and night and the
street sweepers and road crews are moving back towards normal operations.

The approach on all the Cairo thoroughfares involves individuals with brooms
and small dust buckets holding a few litres of sand that is consolidated into
loads for trucks and the whole operation just diligently nips it all in the bud
when operating at full force.

And we began to miss them immediately.

Wind-driven dunes have formed in the absence of the sweepers. Little 6 and 9 cm
dunes that emerged onto the streets from their kerbs, beyond the parking lane
and onto the slow lane... or the fast lane, too, in the instance of a one-way
thoroughfare. They begin growing immediately after about 1 February when public
services retracted in various ways.

There were perhaps a dozen girls old enough to be wearing head scarves sweeping
away at our neighborhood's mysteriously biggest dune in late February or early
March. Mysterious in the sense of why it takes its particular location. No
other place for blocks and blocks has such a big dune. It's at the foot of a
retaining wall against which it is a meter high and spreads out into the street
again rather quickly and rather deeply after being attended to. I saw the young
ladies doing that just the once. At that time I supposed that young people of
such an age in our neighborhoods were hearing small whispers of what momentous
things were happening from their fathers in the Army. Anyway the sand dune has
been getting very big, indeed, and I only saw street sweepers for the first
time again in the last few days.

It all made for a different kind of town for the motorcyclist... the little
dunes. I'll be glad when they've fought it back to the nipping it in the bud
operation it was before the revolution.

Yesterday afternoon and evening I was out with 20 or 30 men from amongst the
customers, mechanics and friends of my motorcycle mechanic. The event was perhaps
the signing of a young mechanic's wedding contract. The street party aspect was
over by the time I got there, the dozens of chairs for the women's area being
stacked and a small Japanese ute/pickup, as they all are here, driven to the
edge of where the chairs had been. It was loaded with furniture and appliances
and then another and another until there were four utes standing there loaded
two and three metres high with wedding gifts... some from friends and
relatives, the rest from the groom himself according to what they agreed he
would provide for the bride upon their marriage.

Then those of us on bikes made a great parade, accompanying the utes to the
young couple's new home, which was some kilometres away. Mostly in heavy
traffic.We left no friends behind. They brought the whole parade to a halt and
closed off some rather large roads for brief periods, the parade all bunched
together and blocking traffic while one or two motorcycle drivers did donuts,
raising thick clouds of unswept sand that the cars and other vehicles at the
parade's road blocks were then allowed the pleasure of driving through.

My drivers license and motorcycle registration are both expired. The bike rego
because I didn't know we had to renew it each year. The drivers license because
I'm about to get a 3 year visa and then I will get a three year drivers
license. So I wasn't right in the middle of the roadblocks the parade was
making.

No, I was normally parked about 100 metres away pretending I didn't know them.
I was the only one wearing a helmet and would have stood out like a sore thumb
if the police interfered. But it's traditional so I perhaps they don't stop
them in normal times either. And there is no such thing as a police chase... on
this side of town, anyway. Good times or bad. They create roadblocks at major
intersection, perhaps, but do not try to chase in Faisal/Pyramids traffic.
You'd just end up crashing into something, splattering pedestrians, etc.

I wear the helmet so the police are less likely to start up a chat but it's
just as well. I can come and go without people noticing I'm not Egyptian. I'm
welcomed warmly where people have known me since before the revolution but
people are entirely different towards me where I'm not known. They do NOT like
seeing a foreigner and even if they aren't frowning or simply withholding
emotion altogether, they aren't curious anymore at all and don't strike up
conversations. They just don't want to saddle up next to a new foreigner these
days. Not at all.

But I had fun at the kofta shop some days ago. The young man at the maitre d
desk who I've known for a couple years introduced a gentlemen of 60 or so as
the restaurant's owner. We began bantering around and the young man gave me an
Arabic newspaper as he stepped into the barbequing room for a moment and I
showed the older man that I was holding it upside down as the young man was
coming back towards us from the grill. Glad for dumb amusement the older
gentleman brightened up and snorted.

The young man sat down in his desk's chair, I was holding the newspaper as
mentioned, he noticed and began to speak but I flipped it so the top of page
one was facing me right-side-up, widened my eyes in recognition and barked out
the paper's name: "El Masry El Youm (The Egyptian Day)!", and shot it
up to my face pecking it with a kiss... a standard sort of peck that brings
laughter easily as I used the body motion of pecking unexpected money. The full
routine is to touch the money to the breast, then give it the peck, then touch
it to the forehead, making a rolling upward motion with the wrist as the hand
with the loot moves away from the head. But if you peck perfectly and have
thought to rock the head slightly backwards in joy and amazement immediately
before the peck... well, it does the trick.

Then I cried out in excitement, "El Masri El Youm! El awwil gornal... (The
Egyptian Day! The first newspaper that...)"... "Aywa, huwwa da! (Yes,
it was)" said the older man (the first independent Egyptian paper of any
consequence which has been braving the waters since 2004, something like 20
other independents starting up and following in it's wake). The older man was
plainly joyous that I would know it meant so much to them.

The young man was delighted to see the elder man enjoying himself and said to
me, "Huwwa abi (He's my father)."

"Mish kazaab (No lie)?" (There is resemblance)

An iconic expression to go with the preceding iconic gesture and they fell to
pieces laughing just as my order came out from the grill and I left in triumph.

But for the moment, one is not received that way at all these days unless known
to have been here from before the revolution. I guess I did alright at a pizza
place I'd never been to before six or eight days ago. But it started off
immediately with having them talk to Reda who placed the order over the mobile
as soon as I arrived. That rather put them at ease. Then they found I could
account for myself to some extent in Arabic and we conversed off and on as the
pizzas were prepared and baked. Even the Australian passport is a worry in
present circumstances because Israeli intelligence services so often produce
fake Australian passports for their operatives. And there is some continuing
disbelief that all that has happened internally and the notion that Israel and
America were behind the revolution... and not from the liberal educations and
internet organization of their youth... which in fact it was.

I'm now off the heavy schedule of the last two months helping to prepare the
fiscal years 2011-2016 work plan at Hunger Alliance of Ghana. They are saying
specifically that there will be little to do until late July as an August
conference I may help with looms large on the horizon and I go down there for
the first time. So I will now try to expand my client base with respect to
commercial copy editing work for translation agencies.

Reda's retirement has seen little rest as she is going all over town getting
her exit documents together for her pension and continuing health coverage
benefits.

Just as all that had fairly well run its course, a large water pipe broke in
the building she owns with her sister and they are gutting, entirely, the old
plumbing on the five residential floors and redoing it with more modern stuff.
They had done the same thing to their mosque on the ground floor last year. She
was gone all yesterday and today. We talked last night and tonight about
getting out of town for a few days but it won't happen until the plumbing's
done. She just takes care of all this stuff herself... she and her sister,
Zuba... I didn't know until tonight that it was emergency work and not
something they had been planning before two days ago.

The revolution slowly grinds on. Nothing much happened at Tahrir (Liberation
Square) this Friday. The army is said to control 30% of the economy by some
measures. The interim Prime Minister is from Mabarak's detested party. The
newspapers devote a lot of attention to secular groups as the general public is
without such leadership and organization. I politely stay out of it as I did in
Australia before getting citizenship.

Thank you for your time,
Jeff

10 June 2011 – a
festive evening

My friends,

The wedding function I reported about a week ago... the gathering together of
four utes full of furniture and appliances and their parading through miles of
the neighborhoods with 30 odd motorcycles to the young couples' new home...
went on to its logical conclusion last night... the actual wedding party. The
function before the loading of the trucks a week ago may have been the contract
ceremony... the young lady was in a kind of bridal gown, anyway.

But last night was the 5 hour, 200 decibel public event... a "street"
wedding rather than a "club" (or hotel) wedding but of a certain sort
where the largest vacant lot possible is hired and outfitted with 20 foot tall
walls of fabric sort of like massive, decorated carpet-drapes special-made for
such functions and their infrastructure. Then lights are draped in various
arrays overhead and there was a large stage, perhaps 15 metres wide and 5
metres deep for the band. I didn't have my camera along because such events
always have a full video crew anyway.

The empty lot was perhaps 40 metres wide and 60 metres deep and it was all lit
up gaily, 2/3 for men and their tables and 1/3 on the other side of a low wall
of carpet for women and small children, the bride and groom on display on a
dais that I couldn't see from where I sat. I didn't see the groom all night
except right at first because I arrived a little early while they were still
setting up... about 9:30 I think it was. The groom never roams the men's area
for more than a few moments and does not attempt to greet or converse with all
who attend.

I took Reda's nephew Mamoud who is now speaking a lot more English and 22
rather than 19 and a half. He's got a tough row to hoe. No siblings. His
divorced mother, Zuba's only co-resident, which will also be his lot when he
gets married, doomed by custom and circumstance to be home by midnight or only
slightly later to secure his mother's safety and virtue. Reda stayed behind
with Zuba as she doesn't know the bride and the 3/4 of the seating usually set
aside for the men is always explained as the main opportunity for the men of
the bride's family to start rubbing elbows with the men of the groom's family.
The groom's "women" don't, as I understand it, attend in large
numbers.

The music is always too loud and continuous to allow much conversation so we
just sat back and munched the grapes and plums and other things they brought us
and watched the stage. A pleasant man of 35 or 40 was the only other guest at
our table, we conversed in small bits and learned of mutual friends when the
band had the occasional lull and his three gorgeous children between about 6
and 10 ran up to the table again and again through the evening to report on
their adventures. His wife was perhaps on the women's side or perhaps did not
come at all.

A young, dignified belly-dancer came on stage about 10:30 and the men took no
special notice. But I glanced over to the wall of carpet that separated us from
the women and all the women who were tall enough and up to about the age of 25
were stretched over the top of the wall, arms hanging over the top, studiously
observing the young dancer, little girls pulling themselves up high enough to
look over the top for short moments.

There's a kind of scarf that married women tie low around their waist and drape
down over one hip or the other and put on in the bedroom and dance with before
their husbands when they want sex. One can find them in shops downtown and most
other places. They might have little disks of light metal and other things that
make them clink and chime. And the woman goes through some period of time,
securing it around her waist and then loosening it and holding it up around her
shoulders and bringing it back down to the hips as she belly-dances and seduces
her husband.

Apparently the young ladies at the wedding party were curious to see what the
belly dancer might know/do that they didn't.

Shortly after midnight I noticed that the wall between us and the women was
begin dismantled, the bride and groom were absent from the dais and the women,
all in black by the way, were herding out the entrance and departing. At that
moment the main rows of overhead lights on the far side of the men's area went
dark and the sound system failed. Mahmoud and I watched the spectacle of
workers standing ladders on top of tables and pyramids of them securing the
ladders to heights of 20 feet while one of them climbed the ladder and
attempted to deal with the power failure which they eventually resolved. By
then all the women were clear of the entrance and Mahmoud and I departed, our
motorcycle, one of three when we arrived, now buried deep behind 50 or 60
others... the guards and attendants extracting it for us... everyone quite
chuffed... a perfect wedding party from their point of view and ours.

Egyptian English language newspapers are rather cautiously reporting about an Israeli
citizen now being held for 15 days for investigation of, amongst other things,
having been involved in an evening of Copt-Muslim tensions that left 12 dead:

I was glad to be asked by an Egyptian man who I respect what
I thought best for the future of Egypt. I was glad he asked and had an answer
ready.

“I’m quite certain,” I said, “that Egypt will do a lovely job of solving its problems
without my help.”

He was glad for my answer and we went on talking about other
things.

Every time I go into Faisal and Pyramids of an evening
dozens of small things seem worth writing about with all my affection. Usually
it involves tea with the motorcycle mechanics and at Ibrahim’s toktok (motorised
tri-wheeled taxi) spare parts shop.

Assim, Reda’s cousin, is one of the last standing of the
formerly numerous downtown hostels and I go down there, too. He says he can
take the losses now and through the summer and will then take stock again in
light of how “the season” begins October onwards. We see each other every
couple of days at Ibrahim’s although I avoid the hostel a bit because diehard
protesters close down a lot of the roads unpredictably right in town’s centre
where it’s most convenient to pass when coming into downtown from Pyramids.

Jimmy Carter was here and declared the Parliament elections free
and fair.

Like the Yanks, only 50% of Egyptians voted. In general Egyptians’
greatest concerns remain the same as before the revolution… continued economic
growth, an end to patronage, cronyism and corruption, an end to American aid –
70% don’t want it anymore. American aid is now measured at about 1.6 or 1.8
billion USD. Egypt’s bi-lateral trade with Turkey was over $3 billion in 2010
and that’s just one country. Egypt has a multitude of trade partners and
loosing the Yank money wouldn’t dent them up badly. But America has a card up
its sleeve in the long term dependence Egypt will have on spare parts for its
Air Force, etc.

Yesterday or the day before was meant to be the announcement
of the verdict in the Mubarak trial according to people who mentioned to me
beforehand or told me they didn’t want to go out that evening for fear of
trouble. But it was announced that day that the verdict would be announced in
June which is after the presidential election they recently rescheduled from
June to May. Parliament is sitting and going through a period of establishing
rules, procedures and protocols. There was a string of bank robberies that left
everybody incredulous… worried about their own safety for the first time, many
of them.

Pain relievers and anti-depressants are selling well in the
context of the low level but constant fear of things getting deadly again or
the economy not one day picking up again. We’re both taking headache tablets
several times a week.

Reda said something… about what I don’t recall… but what she
said was, “Enta no enchanté…” (“You [Arabic] aren’t very enchanting…”). Perhaps
I belched. Yes, I think that was it but then we both laughed at the level of
our language use. “Whatever does the job.” We’re just awful. And kind of enjoying
it for the most part. “If you were marooned on a desert island with …”

I’m so glad to have landed here for retirement and to have
lived the revolution together with Reda. Incredible, amazing history that it
is. Wonderful spirit that she is.

A longish note. The next to the last under the “Small
Wedding” banner.

These “Small Wedding in Cairo” missives now add up to 65,000
words and I will end it all with a few final missives about the results of the
two stage presidential election over the next nine or ten weeks.

Over the last couple years… I fell in with an Egyptian, Mohsen Rashad
AbuBakr, whose novel about Cairo street vendors was a timely addition to
the revolutionary literary scene. It exposes corrupt practices by the police
and I don’t actually know if he meant to publish it before the revolution…
which would have been rather bold. Free speech did eventuate more or
less immediately after the revolution except some people, fewer and fewer now,
still get carted off to jail for “insulting the armed forces”. Perhaps that
will end after the presidential election. Perhaps it already has. What I’ve
noticed on the topic lately has just concerned trials pursuant to arrests of
months and months ago.

In any event, it was an educated Tunisian street vendor who
set off the first Arab Spring revolution through self-immolation when a
policeman tried to rob him of his livelihood… so, fortuitously, street vendors
have a bit of a special place in people’s hearts these days. I don’t know how
well Mohsen’s book is doing but I know he’s getting interviewed a bit on the
Cairo satellite TV channels.

He wants his book translated into English and I want mine
translated into Arabic, after Reda (my wonderful wife) and Assim (her wonderful
cousin) censor it. I will then first see if there is any offence taken in the
community here and then publish in English, too, if Egyptians seem to think
it’s worth a read. Mohsen and I are to see each other in the next few days to
talk about setting up a schedule for me helping with his translation to English
and him helping me with the translation of mine to Arabic. We’ll see how it
goes.

We won’t have stories to tell this year about Ashraf, the
carpenter who Assim and the others of their group of boyhood friends are now
shunning until he wins his wife back. I drove by Ashraf’s shop two days ago
expecting the usual picture of neglect but there was a large project spread out
onto the street so maybe the day will come.

Another of their childhood friends is General Alaa who lost
his larynx last year or the year before (we all chain smoke). They all come
from Faisal at a time when it was still mostly farmed flood plain and dominated
by the fabled El Gabry family which now numbers 20,000 and has “lots of
millionaires” from property development projects and deals, I suppose, for
selling land that they are said to have owned in abundance and had previously
committed to agricultural production.

Now the new families of 50 years ago are maturing and buying
tens of thousands of the new apartments for their children and grandchildren.
These neighborhoods used to be built up to six stories, square kilometre after
square kilometre – thereby earning the area the highest population density in
the world - but now its all twelve stories – so soon we’ll be twice the density
of whoever’s second, I suppose). It’s nice in the summer as it means minimal
direct sunlight and the neighborhood streets are cool canyons away from the
sun-baked main streets.

I think I once was told whether General Alaa was a police
general or an army general but I am inclined to let such information go fuzzy
in my mind as I don’t want to be known for giving it much thought or attaching
any significance to it, a habit Egyptians appreciate in such matters. I was a
polite guest of Australia and didn’t say anything there, either, until I became
a citizen. Then I limited my activities to just that of joining the Canberra
pro-Palestinian group. Here I limit my activities to criticisms of America’s
blind eye when it comes to the government of Israel’s rape of Palestinian land,
life and liberty.

The majority of Israelis see no virtue in the settlements
but the neo-Zionists contrive to force the government to require their support
in coalition governments, etc. And the Israeli voters are like American voters.
They vote according to “domestic” issues rather than “foreign” policy so things
really are quite bad for the Palestinians these days. And there is, especially,
just about zero reporting on the plight of Palestinians, Muslim and Christian,
on the West Bank. Haaretz
is an anti-neo-Zionist Israeli newspaper that gives a bit of the daily blow by
blow. A good bit. It’s enough to make you sick and there are web sites that
give the hour-by-hour, day-by-day incremental losses on the West Bank if you
have the stomach for it. It’s obscene. Hamas is difficult to control. But it
was Hamas, after all, that created an unmanageable situation for Israel in Gaza
and made Sharon withdraw his obnoxious settlers. That withdrawal had nothing
whatsoever to do with, for instance, the so-called Oslo “Accords”.

Assim, Alaa, myself and others start keeping track of each
other from about four in the afternoon and do what we can to see our paths’
cross in the late afternoon or early evening at Ibrahim’s spare parts shop for
toktoks. The toktoks (motorised tricycle taxis) first appeared while I was away
2006-2008 and by the time I got back there was an import ban on them because
the general population of motorists thought there was getting to be too many of
them. But they have their place in the neighborhoods now and observe, though
not scrupulously, the ban on them where the speed limit is 60 kph or more.
Larger vehicle drivers are more used to them now and the import ban was lifted
in the last six months or something. And, indeed, their numbers are surging in
the streets. So Ibrahim got into the right business at the right time.

Ibrahim is from Kuwait and we met seven years ago at Assim’s
nightly soirées at his used furniture shop which was around the corner from
Ibrahim’s shop at that time. We drank tea delivered by the coffee shop to
Assim’s used furniture shop six and seven years ago and have been drinking tea
at Ibrahim’s toktok spare parts shop next to the coffee shop since I returned
in 2008, Assim having closed down his little used furniture place while I was
back in Australia. Ibrahim has a tiny store front out of which he did his house
interiors painting business until it went flat with the revolution and he
turned it, perhaps a year ago, into a toktok spare parts shop. Now the
construction in these neighborhoods is surging again but Ibrahim is more
content with the toktok spare parts routine.

After seven years Ibrahim and I are finally able to talk to
each other a bit without Assim as interpreter. I was surprised when his sister
died in that neighborhood six or eight weeks ago. I didn’t have any idea that
he had Kuwaiti relatives here. I asked him about it a couple weeks after she
died and he told a general story of moving back and forth for 33 years… 20 here
and 13 in Kuwait, during which time he built an apartment building a couple
hundred metres from his shop. Six stories, I think they are on that street, his
sister somehow coming to live on one floor, the other floors occupied by
relatives of his wife who is Egyptian and perhaps other relatives of his, too.

Arab labourers move around as they like, to some extent. I
think there were one or two million Egyptian workers evacuated from Iraq after
Boy W. George’s coalition of the willing invaded Iraq and set into motion the
series of events that now see Iraq nestling up to Iran. Then there were other
hundreds of thousands of Egyptians working in Libya and millions, perhaps,
still in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and the others. Egypt is or was tolerant about
Arabs from other nations working here. It is a fluid system, regionally,
although less so now because of the civil wars, revolutions and the resulting
economic downturns. I don’t know that there was ever much going with Syria,
though. Egyptians hate the Syrian regime and government to government relations
have been icy for decades.

Ibrahim’s tiny shop is on the “old contract” sort of lease
where one, in essence, pays for twenty and thirty years of a property’s use up
front followed by nominal rents during those twenty and thirty years… 50
Egyptian pounds (~$8 these days) a month in Ibrahim’s case. With toktoks
growing in number, the street is sometimes lined up with five in a row, buying
parts and installing them on the other side of the three or four metre wide
street in front of Ibrahim’s shop.

We crowd, a bit, into his tiny shop for conversation (the
coffee shop next door, like most others, having a TV blaring sports and not
really suitable for conversation - but it is even more convenient to order tea
from than when we met around the corner at Assim’s furniture shop and the
coffee house brought our tea there).

Ibrahim, though we never see him do so, seems to be feeding
a neighborhood cat which is pregnant and now seems to sleep full time at his
shop. People in these neighborhoods don’t keep them as pets and they are all
foraging critters, often tied to a particular place by a particular resource… a
fish market about ten metres from Ibrahim’s shop, for instance, just as there
is a similar band of thieves domiciled about ten metres from my motorcycle
mechanic’s shop where they vie for chicken guts rather than the fish guts near
Ibrahim’s shop.

They look like they’ve been around for generations in both
instances. The cats that drag offal off the chicken butcher’s floor are all
black and whites. The cats that drag offal off from the fish shop are all
orange tabbies. They live well and I have no idea where any of them go when the
chicken and fish shops close. Hunting rats on rooftops and sleeping there, as
well, perhaps. Something keeps the rats and mice all but extinct. I’ve only
seen one in the flesh in Cairo and I never notice droppings anywhere.

I once told the story of Reda’s missiles from the toktok
(throwing her sister’s kitchen rubbish onto piles of rubbish as the toktok sped
down the street – such then being foraged through by herds of sheep and goats
that Bedou and other rural people bring through the next day). If you remember
that story you might have wondered about vermin. But the only rodents or
carnivores other than cats in abundance around town are a very small weasel and
I wonder if the weasels and cats eat the babies of any rats and mice that live
long enough to reproduce. The weasels are found in at least Cairo and
Alexandria. I thought someone once said they are a kind of mongoose but maybe I
imagined that after hearing that Egypt has a variety of mongoose. I finally
went onto the Internet and had a look. It’s a very small weasel called “the
least weasel Mustela nivalis” and is “native to Eurasia, North America
and North Africa”. The Egyptian mongoose described in the literature is much
larger than “the weasel, Mustela nivalis, which is found in Cairo and
Alexandria” and the mongoose is perhaps more of a rural Egyptian dweller.

In any event, there have been no rats or mice, and no bugs
or roaches, either, in any of the flats, buildings or neighborhoods I have
lived in. Ants are even absent in our current apartment. Or are easily dosed to
oblivion when they make their appearance as they did for the first time in our
present apartment a few days ago. The weather is warming up (30s this week, ~15
at night). Perhaps that makes them move around more freely.

I now report on television viewing habits of Egyptian
households that I am aware of. There are perhaps 20 or 40 state-owned TV
channels broadcast by satellite. But when I returned in 2008 everyone was
watching the new Salafi channels which offer, in the main, 24 hours of sermons.
There was no reason to watch the government TV channels for news in 2008 as it
was just government propaganda.

While an elected parliament (“People’s Assembly”) is now in
place and the presidential voting will see its first round 23 and 24 May, the
Cabinet and Ministers are still of the Mubarak era, they control these 20 or 40
government-owned channels and I can only imagine they’ve been broadcasting a
lot of puppy poo. Reda has watched them fervently for 14 months and we never
discuss politics so it was a great surprise to me to come home two evenings ago
and see her watching Al Jazeera Arabic which was broadcasting live events from
Independence Square (Tahrir). She was just rapt and amazed that the coverage
was so different than what the government channels were broadcasting about the
same events. But she looked at me briefly when I thought to try to break her
out of her trance.

“Mish wahesh?” I had asked (“Not bad?”)

“La’a, gamiil,” she replied, incredulous (“No, it’s
gorgeous.”), immediately turning her gaze back to the TV.

She has always held Al Jazeera, amongst other factors,
responsible for the success of the revolution and departure of Mubarak, her
beloved heir of Sadat, who was her beloved heir of her beloved Abdel Nasser who
came to her school when she was a little girl, shook their hands and explained
that there would also be opportunities for higher education for girls when they
were done with Year 12 and he encouraged them to think about doing that, too,
when the time came (and thus her electrical engineering certificate and career
with Egyptian Telecom).

Since the revolution Reda has always called Al Jazeera
“dogs”… “swine”, we would say in English. I sat down and enjoyed the occasion
of her apparently watching Al Jazeera for the first time and then pulled out an
A4 flyer I had from a very well organised presidential candidate’s effort that
has seen some thousands of young men out at Metro stations and other public
places in the last two weeks or so.

There is an empty billboard right on Faisal Street near
Ibrahim’s shop and as I walked from the shop that night to get some cigarettes
I heard a PA system blasting from right below the billboard and I swung around
to approach it from its far side in order to backtrack along the street and
play the passer-by. The billboard faces Faisal Street square on at a distance
of about two metres and passing motorists can only see it fully for some ten
metres or so from the westbound side of the road as they drive past. As I
walked by… what to my wondering eyes did appear but a video of the well
organised gentleman of the last few weeks, gray-bearded with shaved upper lip,
being projected onto the blank billboard. I took one of the A4 flyers the young
men offered me, the first time I took a flyer from one of these groups of young
men I had been seeing around town (all of them black-bearded with shaved upper
lip). I folded the flyer and put it into my jacket pocket.

I pulled it out as I watched Reda watching Al Jazeera and
eventually asked, “Miin da?” (“Who’s this?'). Perhaps 30 percent of the A4
showed a portrait of the smiling candidate.

Distressed at the distraction she turned to take a quick
look, but was then suddenly more interested in the flyer than the TV for a
moment. “Huuwa wahesh!” ('He’s no good!'), said scowled..

“Salafi?” I asked ('Religious conservative?').

She brightened up and giggled. “Oh. Enta arif.” ('Oh. You
know [about them].') I had always pretended I didn’t know the difference. After
her amused distraction of some nanoseconds she turned suddenly serious and
intent and returned her gaze to Al Jazeera Arabic’s live coverage and
interviews with people at Tahrir Square.

So she’s apparently not voting Salafi even though her mosque
(the little one she built with her sister Zuba) is used by Salafis and no
others. A bit of a comment on the live and let live lifeway of most Egyptians,
though not the 30% who vote Salafi and want to introduce Sharia law to Egypt.
Maybe she’ll vote for Suleiman, Mubarak’s spy chief who announced his candidacy
for president yesterday or the day before. That would go far to bring back the
“good ol’ days”. There wouldn’t even have to be a change in the Cabinet. Or
maybe she will vote Muslim Brotherhood which is now running a presidential
candidate after promising for 14 months that they wouldn’t.

I wrote some weeks or months back that with the Muslim
Brotherhood holding 40% of the seats in parliament and Salafis holding 30%,
they would be able to do whatever they want. Indeed, they seem to have done
precisely that in the selection of the 100 seats on the Constitutional
Committee that parliament is to have. Almost no diversity beyond “Islamist”
males. But there is still great hope, on my side. I don’t think the Muslim
Brotherhood will stand for a Sharia constitution and they are loaded with
technocrats who will prevent the damage to the economy that the relatively
unschooled Salafi might want (and do, if they had their way, without really
understanding their economic impact or, for instance, not wanting to
understand other things’ civil rights implications).

Nobody expects a first round victory for any of the
presidential candidates so I will begin a presidential election diary this
weekend and send it out a few weeks after the final round in June or perhaps
July with a post-mortem of those early days after the new president is chosen.

My AmericansInCairo.org website gives links only to the
“semi-official” Al Ahram (The Pyramid) on-line English opinion
pieces going back most of five years. There was substantial criticism of the
government pre-revolution, although the opinion pieces I link are almost
exclusively “semi-official” opinion about the uselessness of the American
government in this neck of the woods… things the Foreign Minister would never
say. But there was and is substantial Al Ahram criticism of Mubarak’s
and now the military executive’s governments, too. It’s kind of a complaint
department of the government itself - spotlighting senseless things some of the
ministries, “governates” and municipalities do and was, perhaps, usually
information that was otherwise prevented from reaching Mubarak or, now, the
military executive, the government in general, by the time Mubarak fled and
even now, only responding to pressure from the executive office and the
Cabinet. So the strategy seemed to me one of giving them bad press when they
deserved it. Then and now the ministries certainly wouldn’t have been responding
to voter complaints without Al Ahram and privately owned newspapers
embarrassing them but then and now the ministries, governates and
municipalities have little to worry about and everybody is waiting to see what
happens when the new president assembles his (certainly it won’t be a woman)
new Cabinet.

Speech, by comparison, became rather free altogether after
Mubarak fled, although I think I recall short incarcerations of press people
about a year ago, of course, and even six months ago.. The only people who get
that treatment these days are reporters or others who “insult the armed forces”
whose top leaders are the executive for the moment. “SCAF”, it is
called. The Supreme Command of the Armed Forces. A bunch of old guys who have
never been in the public eye before. Amazing some of the ill-conceived things
they do sometimes. But the press is free to complain about it and they do and
there are, of late, no arrests for insulting them that I am aware of. It all
lumbers onward while the economy attempts to recover in a fairly rudderless
situation.

We’re a bit immune from what is now said to be 25%
unemployment. Reda reached retirement age about ten weeks after the revolution
started. My commercial copy-editing clients disappeared after the revolution
and we lived last year mainly off the sale of the little flat I had and a bit
of new debt. But now I’m on the American old-age pension (“Social Security”)
which also allows me to make up to $15,000 a year (which I will eventually do
in Ghana and beyond) before it starts to affect the size of my Social Security
payments. Ghana’s first attempt to wire me money is currently frustrated by a
botched merger of their bank with another. “20,000 accounts” have been
corrupted in the attempt to merge the computer records of the depositors of the
two banks. And one by one the 20,000 account records are being reconciled and
restored to what they should be.

We limp along. One look at the pyramids makes me think of a
lot of people over a long period of time that certainly had it worse than us,
then and now.

Viva la revolution,

Jeff

XXXXXXX Malfunction Junction

XXXXXXX The lost property contracts

XXXXXXX The five year old’s funeral

A different kind of sequel

17 May 2012

My promised report upon the end of the second phase of presidential
voting. The outcome is to be announced on the 21st, if I understood
Reda correctly.

Ibrahim’s shop’s street remains lively up to midnight and
past so I usually end up there at the end of any late drives about town on
nights when Reda is staying at Zuba’s. We aren’t out together after 11pm for
any reason as Reda refuses to be on the streets past that time (and she was the
same way before the revolution). And I am always home by 11pm if she is there
alone. The system provides her with a convenient excuse to spend a night with
Zuba and Mahmoud if I have dawdled getting there and she hasn’t spent a night
there all week. It provides me with some convenient flexibility if she is
already at Zuba’s and I wish to dawdle. She just stays there all night which
she is always glad to do if she hasn’t any projects going at home.

Her overnights at their place in Faisal have been frequent
in recent weeks as they are finishing off the seventh floor which they built
over the last couple years and are now also involved in topping off the
building with a small watchman’s quarters. The traditional day-labourer
construction system involves a property owner physically observing the work
through the day or evening. And now that Reda is married, she rather enjoys
being an overseer without the need for a chaperone… or suffering the workmen’s
ill-temperedness over being overseen by an unchaperoned “girl”. Poor Mahmoud.
The thousands of hours he must have spent since eight or ten years old,
chaperoning his maiden auntie.

It is no longer Mahmoud that has Zuba tabӕӕn (“worn out, ill”), requiring Reda’s overnights for moral
support. It is only the construction that requires it for the moment. Some many
weeks ago Mahmoud got a nice laptop from Zuba upon my letting them all know that
I would have some money towards such a purpose eventually. Especially in light
of his need to do well in his final year at the institute and the lack of
wisdom of putting further money into his old desktop, Zuba got him one
instantly.

The second day of the final round of the presidential
election is now past. A real
presidential election leading to a future I would not attempt to predict.

I wouldn’t bother to guess or suggest what is best for
Egypt. It is a stressed economic situation with a constellation of interests
that I am only beginning to appreciate. Governates (states/provinces) which
have always had chief executives appointed from the top echelons of the
military and the detested security police. There was no democracy even at the
municipal level. People’s voices cannot presently be directed to responsible persons
or bodies at even a neighborhood level. The tranquillity of the neighborhoods
speaks volumes about the Egyptian character: the streets mainly bustle serenely
with every age, sex and colour of person because Egyptians, in such massive
proportions, have a well adapted urban culture which seeks and produces mainly
effective conflict resolution results at the neighborhood level. People walk
the Pyramids and Faisal streets with an unselfconscious lack of fear… their
demeanour unconsciously asks, “Isn’t it like this everywhere?” Actually, they well know they are a bit special.

Or do they? There was Sillah, the Sierra Leone policeman on
holiday to Cairo from doing UN duty in Darfur, who I took deep into the neighborhoods
south of Pyramids Street and then south of Tersa Street where we went to my
motorcycle mechanic for a cup of tea. After perhaps an hour of using our
minimal Arabic when the conversation began to lull, I asked him if he would like
to go anywhere else he replied, “No. Thank you. I feel…”

“Safe?” I asked.

“Yes,” he said. “Safe. I’m happy here.” It’s something I’ve
heard of Christian Egyptians saying about there own situation here… that
although they are well and truly discriminated against in law and, I would add,
there seems to be some mutual shunning, they do feel, “Safe.” The exceptions
have been horrific in just the few years I have been here, but those
exceptions, by the occasional Christian comment, are indeed exceptions.

Independence Square was again flooded with people for days
on end recently. The traffic police were absent. For fear of being overwhelmed
amongst people with no affection for the Ministry of the Interior and, too, we
all suspect, due to selective directives to be
absent where, in the instance of traffic police, absence makes the heart grow
fonder.

We didn’t talk about any of it at Ibrahim’s, tonight. We
never do.

Assim and his gang are still shunning Ashraf as he has yet
to win his wife back. General Alaa is going to Hamburg the first of August to
see what they can do about restoring some voicing function for him. The visitor
industry is affected by broader regional issues such as the mess in Syria. No
one is coming to Cairo although the Red Sea hotels were running along with
about 60% occupancy through the late winter and spring. The summer visitor
industry is usually dominated by Arabs from hotter nations coming to Egypt
where it is rarely over 40o C. That trade is much diminished in
Cairo this year.

If there is a sequel to this book, it seems it may involve a
different kind of life for us.

I am involved as a facilitator in a large commodities sale
and there may be more. It seems it will be a matter of only a few more days
before the first “tranche” goes through.It isn’t certain that it won’t all fall through but this is how I will
remember the days of the presidential election… fostering the deal along and
praying that it doesn’t fall through.

So suddenly I may have some initial million of dollars with
which to secure our retirement and ratchet up the West African Breadfruit
Revolution. I would be giving young Ahmad Magdi an MBA scholarship to the
American University in Cairo which he will do in three or four years rather
than two so he will have time to continue and hone his long suffering efforts
to dissuade me from financial misadventure.

It was with sober joy that I emailed him the evening of the
16th:

Hi Ahmed,

Great to see you earlier tonight.

My accountant brother said, with regard to sales,
“Psychologically, you have assume a sale is not going to happen but you still have to go through the
motions of doing what is necessary and planning for what’s next if it is
successful.”

So on the matter of you getting an MBA at AUC, the time of
the year kind of requires that you take action about enrolment for September, I
suppose it is, when the new semester begins... I don’t actually know.

Don’t spend any money until I have money to reimburse you...
I’ve got exactly nothing for the moment... but try to get an interview for
admission in September and take all other (no cost) steps necessary to prepare
to start courses in September. And, of course, I will let you know when I am in
a position to reimburse and make the larger kinds of payments personally.

I have estimated your scholarship to cost $35,000 in tuition
and fees and something like $100,000 for four years of what would be a
combination of salary for the Ghana and other Africa work and a living stipend
for you and your family. That is the most expensive it would be if the
breadfruit projects’ demands on your time make the MBA something which could
only be done properly over 4 years instead of two or three.

So could you please prepare for success by mapping out a
three year and also a four year plan in terms of your course requirements and
which you would want or have to do first in terms of requirements and those
that will be waived due to your accounting BA, and in terms of what courses
would be most interest you and be most relevant to my general needs.

By the way, you do fulfil their requirement to have
completed three years of post-BA work using your undergraduate degree. I think
I recall that as being an invariable requirement.

I only know what their web site says. The most relevant
pages seem to be:

well... I guess that is the only page I bookmarked but there
are some things I downloaded and I attach them.

Your big assignment for the moment is to find out about
taxes on the kinds of commissions I would receive if these deals start going
through and to find out if some of those taxes would be relieved if some of
that income is directed to a registered Egyptian non-profit foundation (what I
will call the Africa Breadfruit Endowment).

And to be really prepared for success, let us contemplate the low
housing market, the large number of empty units very near AUC – New Cairo, and
the wisdom of buying one that you and your family could use while you do your
MBA and the large profit that might result from its sale in three to five
years.

Inshallah,

Gafar

There are professors who have the joy of writing such
letters several times a year through long years in a department. I am glad to
have had just the one.

21 June 2012

The election results were announced today and I shall
express no particular opinion about the result. The Egyptians voters have,
above all, stepped out in large numbers and participated in a vote that matters.

But I am, on the other hand, free to announce that the first
commodity deal went through and we are suddenly a bit wealthy, especially with
respect to what we want or need in our life here in Cairo.

So now our honeymoon picks up where it left off. Maybe we
will start with Dahab where “there wasn’t a single serious thing to do.”

We will travel a bit more than that. Me to Ghana to work on
the breadfruit revolution and also some public health issues. Both of us to
Australia and beyond.

Sweet memories of Pyramids and now Faisal and Dobat Remaya
continue to grow. I see new stories to tell every night but they vanish from my
mind on the way home to do commercial jobs or Ghanaian breadfruit farming and
processing, micronutrient and breast feeding grant applications and projects.

I’m happier here than doing long stretches in Ghana. I
prefer to ride a bicycle or motorcycle so I don’t much like the rain. We have
had none that I remember so far this year.

My four little books for middle school students have been
printed for the mid to late summer sales season before school starts. Dickens’ David
Copperfield and Oliver Twist, and the Lambs’ Tales from
Shakespeare in two volumes, all 120 pages or less with glossary. And now I
will do Gulliver’s Travels for better pay and younger children. I’d do better in
Arabic. I know only baby talk, more or less.

The USA consulate in Jerusalem takes care of people in Egypt
towards whom the American old age social security system has obligations…
rather slowly… I applied in January. Jerusalem seems to be understaffed. We’re
still awaiting an initial payment from them and I am to call the social security
desk at the USA consulate here in Cairo tomorrow to see if there is any news of
what could possibly be wrong this time. They wait in line for answers from
Jerusalem, too. But then it is set up to flow conveniently once it starts… into
our personal US dollar accounts in Egypt. They told me to get the required kind
of account in February which I did, and there it still awaits their attentions.

A little bit less
official these days. It has always been in the hands of progressives in a
certain sense so there is a different set of tensions with the new president.
But pretty measured stuff that always avoided certain topics and now avoids
certain others.

There are laws
against “insulting” people or perhaps just public officials here and, perhaps,
in most Middle Eastern nations. It has rarely been invoked in the past but has
recently become popular with certain plaintiffs. Recent articles on that and
some of the other lighter aspects of the revolution abound.

But it is no joke.
More and more people are out of work and I don’t think it’s clear to anybody
that the Muslim Brotherhood has an economic plan. And it isn’t clear that the
legislative and judiciary would cooperate even if there was one.

I should probably
read up on the “insult” laws to see if they also protect foreign officials.

From Israel and
America, for instance.

People rarely
comment on Al Ahram pieces. I just
assumed they never published comments because they had not previously published
any of mine and I had never seen any others. I gave up after two or three tries
a year ago or more.

But the new
Secretary of State of the United States of America, John Kerry, was in town
some weeks ago, and I spit some venom and submitted it, assuming it would just
vanish into the ether as the others. But much to my surprise, Al Ahram vetted and posted it. It’s
still there:

Good luck to John Kerry as he deals
with the North Korea situation but a pox on him and the horse he rides around
upon in the Middle East. He is not welcome in the Middle East beyond America’s
wayward colony, Israel. Netanyahu, after all is a Yank and a violent and racist
Yank at that. And all the Middle East knows that. Now that the American
president has abandoned hope of staring down Netanyahu, it is time for Sec.
Kerry to cut the shinola and quit talking about “the” peace process. The peace
process will only begin when Israel withdraws it settlers from the West Bank
and East Jerusalem. And why not? The French “settlers” had to withdraw from
Algeria fifty years ago even though some of their families had been there 100
years and more. Israel and AIPAC imagine they are buying time. They are only
buying hatred in the context of American fiscal bankruptcy at home and fewer
and fewer welcome mats in the Middle East. And I might add, it is disingenuous
of the US State Department to be sending roving ambassadors to Cairo to
complain about the treatment of Egyptian Christians when American’s great
friend, the government of Israeli, treats Palestinian Christians is just as
badly as it treats Palestinian Muslims. History will spit on the memory of
AIPAC, the cowered American political establishment and the government of
Israel through these present decades. (end comment)

I changed “cowered American political
establishment” to “cowered American political class” in another complaint about
Kerry on another day and they published that, too. But I didn’t make a bookmark
of the webpage address and I forget what it was. But I have noticed since that
they do publish comments on public health articles, for instance, and other
matters of civic concern and opinion.

And then the published another one of
my comments yesterday or the day before; a comment on a article in which they
were whinging about Kerry again:

Haaretz called Secretary Kerry "a
naive and ham-handed diplomat who has been acting like a bull in the china
shop," and did so because that is quite precisely what he is. The chances
of Kerry irritating the American Israel Public Affairs Committee or Mr
Netanyahu are certainly non-existent. Jimmy Carter is quite irritated with
people of Kerry's ilk as he (Mr Carter) favours a rights based approach which
seems nowhere on Mr Kerry's radar screen. If America, President Obama,
specifically, won't bring him out of the wilderness and put Mr Carter to good
use, perhaps Egypt should. (end comment)

Otherwise, I have, as usual, limited my
political commentary to simply linking Al
Ahram complaints about America on my website, www.americansincairo.org, as I have at least
monthly since 2007.

It’s not much of an “org”. I think it
takes two or more people to be prosecuted for conspiracy under American law so
I just do it by myself. I haven’t made a personalised posting to it since 11
September 2011. I’ll leave it there for posterity but keep adding links to Al Ahram opinion.

Al
Ahram calmly keeps letting the outside world
know what is wise and what is not and the Yank administrations go on and on
casting that good advice to the wind. Kerry, for instance, casting aspersions
on Turkish Prime Minister Erdogan over his plans to visit Gaza. Maybe
that was the article where Al Ahram
published my more or less duplicate “Kerry’s horsie” comment… yes, it was, I
just found it:

I had forgotten what it might have
been. And speaking of lost and found… Kerry’s a fish out of water in this neck
of the woods. He has no sense of himself being the idiot when he comes to these
places. To the Egyptians, he’s just another fumb duck wandering through the
neighbourhood like Hillary was. Hillary who couldn’t understand why Oslo fell
apart before the ink was dry. She also, personally, plants trees in Africa so
she is not without her merits. But seeing beyond American Israel Public Affairs
Committee (AIPAC) buzz words and mythology doesn’t seem to be one of them. I
was glad to see her silent rage at the UN a year or two ago when action on
Syria was vetoed by Russia. Now she knows what 1.5 billion Muslims and a lot of
other people felt like when her State Department vetoed measures favouring
Palestinian humanity in the Security Council.

The government of Israel’s rape of Palestine,
Christians as well as Muslims, goes on unabated and Hillary and now John Kerry
didn’t and now won’t do uck fall about it the Security Council.

And Obama gazes out his window and sees
nothing to be done when luminaries like Kerry and the Clintons can’t think of
anything else to do. The bottom line is that Obama is just another Yank without
much knowledge of the outside world.

So off they go to Asia/Pacific to find
new pastures for their trillion dollar a year military. Possibly they’d get
assassinated like John F. Kennedy if they didn’t.

It’s worth watching the recent movie
“Thirteen Days”, to remember how Kennedy wrested a war in Cuba out of the hands
of the American military leadership.

And it is also worth knowing that Vice
President Johnson was already signing new war orders for Vietnam on the plane
that carried him back to DC from the Kennedy assassination.

History will not forget that it was
Texans who dragged us into major commitments in Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq;
an especially dumb one with a “patriotism” trump card, in the end. Boy W.
George. The Great Connector of Dots. He declined Bill Clinton’s parting advice
to take Al Qaeda seriously and made up for it with two wars after consulting
with Vice President Halliburton.

In any event, Egypt’s years of
“friendship” towards the American government have run their course and I have
the pleasure of crawling off my motorcycle and shocking the socks off Yanks
still here who spend a lot of time worrying about their movements, etc. I just
dress in pointie-toed shoes and go where I wanna, wanna to and do what I wanna,
wanna do.

60,000 km on the mean streets of Cairo,
now. I’ll get that new bike after we know more about this new copy editing
income.

Ninety-five per cent of Egyptians are
said to want little to do with the government of America in the future. Which
would mean at least half the Egyptian Christians feel that way, too, if they
were part of the demographic surveyed.

Since the administration of Jimmy
Carter, the American government has simply never done one thamn ding to clarify
natural justice issues at the level of the government of Israel’s rape of
Palestinian land, life and liberty… the paramount Arabic measure of what
America is or isn’t doing in the neighbourhood, although the Yank government
gives no evidence of having noticed. Reagan never followed up on Carter’s
initiatives. Bush the elder was a single term president so we don’t really know
what he might have done if given a second term. Clinton’s Oslo hopes were from
Lala Land.

There is presently an immensely
thorough and disturbing four part Al
Jazeera documentary series on Zionism since the 19th Century
airing these days (Al Nakba):

Tony Blair turns out to simply be true
to his nation’s history rather than just a religious nutter.

I saw King Abdullah of Jordan being
interviewed on TV briefly by an American reporter several years ago, a young
woman. “Why do your people care what’s happening to the Palestinians?” she
asked most sincerely and curiously, well amazed at what people around Jordan
had been saying during her whirlwind tour.

King Abdullah didn’t even try. He knew
there wasn’t the smallest thread with which to help such people begin
unravelling their misperceptions. “It’s hard to explain,” he said quietly.
“They care a lot about it.” And then he changed the subject.

So today, there’s nothing like John
Kerry fumbling around the neighbourhood to remind me of America’s misdirected
“defence” spending. The last person I talked to when leaving Australia for
Cairo in 2008 was a Yank engineer of some sort at the Sydney airport. He was on
his way home after doing some business in Australia. He was shocked that I was
going to live in Egypt and gleeful over the persecution of the Palestinians. It
was the Book of Revelations come to life. Jesus will come back if we help the
government of Israel treat the Palestinians badly enough. “It’s the Rapture,”
he said. I was very glad he was going his way and I was going mine.

I’m not sure what kind of small
holidays to Reda’s relatives we’ll be taking to Upper Egypt. But now that I
pause to think about it, we’ll probably be alright if I wear a galabea and we
just speak Arabic without the pidginised prattling that we use around the
household.

There’s something called “the 200 basic
word list” in linguistics and we’re ploughing through the verbs, albeit without
much of a horse or whip. It will be our first book together. I’ve been out of
touch with the geriatric language learning literature and there are a lot of
new methods that have me curious and seem to be working.

Reda is at their apartment building
full time these days. After most of 25 years she and her sister Zuba have
finished the sixth floor apartment, built a half apartment on the roof and are
populating it by way of some serious chicken and duck husbandry. Other people
have goats on the roofs all through The Pyramids. They and the chickens and the
ducks eat the organic scraps and cuttings that would otherwise flow into the
trash disposal system of Greater Cairo. Eighty-five per cent of Cairo’s rubbish
is recycled. The highest rate in the world, if I recall correctly. All by
freelance individuals and networks. It doesn’t, perhaps, cost the government a
penny so far as I know. At our buildings they even sweep the street and
footpaths clean when they are done loading the rubbish onto their trucks or
donkey carts. Plastics recycling, etc.

It often amuses me that my www.americansincairo.org is such an old
address that it ranks #1 on Google searches when asking for “americans in
cairo”, “americans in egypt”, and some of the other variations. And I have a
visitor tracker that just gives the city of the visitor and the rank of my
listing. And it is “#1” all over the world.

The American embassy has to pay for a
placement advert to get to the top of the page above me. In any event, Al Ahram has provided me with things worth
reading for most of ten years. I regret that I only have about 7 years of
links. It saves be time when trying to remember at precisely what time the
government of the United States of America was involved with precisely what
vicious or senseless blunder.

The Yanks would be better off giving Jimmy Carter the Middle
East desk and doing exactly what he said. I saw him interviewed on TV a few
weeks ago, speaking rather sternly to a 35ish American media dude who seemed to
belong to the AIPAC Fan Club or something. America needs Jimmy Carter as
Secretary of State or its Middle East czar. The sooner Netanyahu has a stroke
like Sharon, the sooner the world will be a lot better off. Having someone like
Jimmy Carter who would stare down Netanyahu and tell America why… it would just
be heaven.

Revolutionarily, these days are a lot like Saipan at the
turn of the decade 1979-1980 and thereafter. People finally got to elect their
own governor and the legislature was no longer constrained by an American
“District Administrator” who could veto their legislation. But they elected one
party’s candidate as governor and elected the other party to a majority in the
legislature. And the legislature and executive spent the next four years trying
to block whatever the other wanted to do. In Egypt today is a rump, old-guard
upper house. There is a vacant lower house. There is an old-guard judiciary.
And there is a Muslim Brotherhood president.

The story of new democracy around the world in the last 50
years and more has often been a story of disappointment to all. They so longed
for the day they could speak freely.
But, of course, it didn’t always occur to them that no one might listen. And they so longed for a vote
that would matter. But it doesn’t
mean they will like the result.They’re
like the Yanks for the moment in the sense that they don’t vote in great
numbers unless. Thirty-five or forty per cent in the lower house election that
the judiciary nullified, as I recall. The Australians vote in much larger
numbers because they get fined if they don’t.

But look what they get. A Prime Minister and Foreign
Minister who are starting to vote against Palestinian humanity in the UN like
the Micronesians. For American military favours in both instances. When I was
in Micronesia in the late 1970s the Federated States negotiators (FSM: Yap,
Chuuk, Pohnpei and Kosrae) told the Yank negotiators that, “If you give us $500
million a year, we won’t let the
Chinese military use our ports.” And these were the years when the Cultural
Revolution had only just been abandoned.

Well, it worked. The Yank negotiators believed them and gave
them the $500 million a year. So that’s the history of FSM, Marshall Islands
and Belau voting with America against Palestinian humanity in the UN. And now
something similar is the story of Australia coming on side in those UN votes in
return for visions of new American military bases in Australia.

So, my long strategy of first letting people know I’m from
Australia is now met with some disdain due to the recent UN votes. My
concealment of my Micronesian connections remains rather complete. But more
people are starting to know that I was originally from America and there are
coming to be occasional uncomfortable situations. Fortunately, no one has any
occasion to wonder about my ancestors who are entirely Danish but for one
Swedish great grandfather.

I was in Cairo in 2005 when Jyllands-Posten published the fabled Mohammad (PBUH) cartoons.
Flags from Danish visitors immediately vanished from the downtown curio shops.
At the larger supermarkets I saw whole dairy cases emptied of their
predominately Danish products overnight.

This has often left the present household bereft of rokfort (blue cheese) which Reda loves
even more than I. We were occasionally finding some nice German stuff for two
or three years at a certain supermard
but then I brought home what they had a couple weeks ago and it was just
heavenly. Beyond doubt, the best since 2005.

Reda mentioned that there was a new batch at home when I
went to see her yesterday evening at their place in Faisal. The men who are,
after 25 years of bit by bit construction, now finishing the building are doing
the stairwell with a cream-coloured granite stone over the “temporary” roughly
poured concrete steps of the last 25 years. They work from about 11pm to 5am
when no one needs the staircase and use some kind of white, quick-drying
mortar. It’s really gleaming and looking spectacular. Muhandisa Reda is the construction supervisor through those long
hours then sleeps there until early afternoon when I go over to visit. So last
night she tells me there is more of the blue cheese in the fridge and I came
home and ate all of it as I wrote this missive through the night.

I wanted to remember the brand name so I just looked through
the trash. There was some microscopic writingon the back side of the foil wrapper. I couldn’t read it so I
scanned it into the computer and enlarged it. There, more or less
surreptitiously, were the words: “Made in Denmark”.

So tomorrow is the fifth anniversary of the day Reda and I were
introduced – and her birthday as well – and I then began these missives.

The last thing I wrote about six months ago was so dark I regret
pushing the send button and waited for a day or preferably period of time when
things were going better all round and lately, indeed, they have been.

We are in the middle of a week in Aswan celebrating and there is
much to celebrate as a household. I’ve been a steady Five Star with the
outsourcing service I’ve been with for about year or most of a year. They have
a mixed system where jobs may be on a fixed fee or hourly basis and it seems to
be our hourly totals that give us more visibility to clients who want to find
their own freelancer rather than post the job description to the freelancers as
a whole. The hours climbed upward and upward and are finally doing me some good
as most of my jobs now come from direct offers from potential clients. A couple
letters I wrote are appended below that cover most of that ground.

I told Reda today that the next time we get a room at a hotel I
want one that comes with a donkey to carry back all the stuff she gets at the
market. She really loaded me down a couple days in a row and yesterday I told
her I wasn’t going to be carrying any big piles of stuff back to the hotel…
that she could get a taxi or whatever she wanted but it wasn’t going to be me
anymore. She gaily assumed I was kidding… but thence got to carry back the six
or eight kilos of bread she got for 80 cents and then had to spend yesterday
and today giving most of it away as it is more or less impossible for two
people to eat that much bread before it goes off. But the overarching issue is
now deceased… we’re up to our weight limit for the flight home so there won’t
be any more 2km walks from those markets with 10kg of the special dates they
grow here, etc.

There are only about two days of touristy things to do in Aswan…
the magnificence of the high dam and one of the monuments they relocated to
higher ground. We did that two days ago and then today we did the other
standard tour which is to a sparkling Nubian village across the river and a
fantastic botanical garden on an island in between. There are no bridges across
the Nile except for up at the old dam and the newer high dam which are far
enough away that they haven’t been a causeway for Aswan city to the other side
of the Nile and there the desert and traditional living begins at the shore

I think the creative writing bias in the late 1960s really kind of
hurt us at the University of Iowa.

The English composition teachers in our Freshman English mandatory
courses were graduate students, often from the world renowned International
Writers Workshop (Kurt Vonnegut and others, as I recall; I just looked up
Vonnegut and the Workshop on Wikipedia... there are photos of Vonnegut and I
recognized him instantly from around the campus although I didn't know at the
time that it was him).

All I remember is our TA's instruction in creative writing... if
there was a grammar of English textbook we were never told to open it.

So the first Canadian copy editing outsourcing people noticed that
I couldn't get everything done right on their demanding schedules and relegated
me to large works that occasionally come to them with long time lines. There,
from about a year ago, I put to good use their online manuals of the rules of
written English and the variances by major dialect.

And now I am a consistent five star with a larger but less
lucrative outfit. I attach a list of major works proofed or edited.

We were able to pay off all our personal debt from the revolution
by the end of last year and are now attacking the pile of pfennigs I owe the
CBA - and we will celebrate the fifth anniversary of our small
wedding in Cairo mid-April in Aswan. The anniversary of our introduction,
actually - which was on Reda's birthday. The wedding party and going home
together for the first time was mid-May and registration with the ministry was
in June or July.

In Aswan I will still have work coming in but we will be there a
week which is twice as long as needed to see most everything. There I will use
my shirttail relationship to the UI Writers Workshop to put out another
"Small Wedding in Cairo" missive. I was so distressed at how dark the
one last one was that I have been waiting for months to find myself in a better
mood. That comes and goes but there really hasn't been much news. The
revolution lumbers on...

I append some of the Wikipedia statements about the UI Writers
Workshop. It has a great pile of kudos that I was hardly aware of.

The great copy editor,

Jeff

"The program began in
1936, with the gathering of poets and fiction writers under the direction of Wilbur
Schramm. Graduates earn a Master
of Fine Arts degree in English; Iowa has the oldest program in the country
offering such a credential.[2]"
(Wikipedia 20140314)

"Faculty and graduates
affiliated with the Iowa Writers' Workshop have won 28 Pulitzer
Prizes, including 16 won by graduates since 1947, and graduates and
faculty of the University
of Iowa have won over 40.[4]"

22 March 2014

Jeffrey C. MarckPhD Linguistics (The Institute, Australian National U.)

If one Googles "english copy editing egypt" the first three
unpaid hits are your announcements of 9 May, 2013, 8 July, 2013 and 3 December,
2013. The fourth is mine. It is five years old.

With two and six month intervals in your placing such announcements I
wondered if there might be another one coming up sooner or later and if I might
resubmit an application for your files.

I first applied in person to Mr Hani Shukrallah in the weeks when your
operation was being set up some four or five years ago. He might well remember.
I badly flunked the test, "...both in terms of the time taken and the
quality..." As I did at The Egyptian Day as it was called at the
time.

Since then I have been wandering the wilderness and honing my skills. I
am now a Five Star proof-reader with the world's largest outsourcing web site,
www.oDesk.com, with a money back guarantee (which is guaranteed by oDesk in a
beta undertaking utilising their top performers).

One can go to the oDesk address and search for "Jeffrey Charles
Marck" for my profile and evidence of my Five Star rating and oDesk
guarantee.

4.92, actually... one two star from an aggressive youngster in Beirut
with a "translation company", disappointed that her $10 didn't go
further than it did. And one four star from a disorganised client in the UK,
disappointed that I said I was going to have to shift her from per-task to
hourly because she didn't appreciate what all the changes in the wind at her
end were costing my time.

I am a trained linguist with a PhD (The Institute, Australian
National University) but trained in descriptive and comparative linguistics
rather than formal English grammar. That I learnt rather lately. I'm from the
oft Pulitzer Prize winning Writer's Workshop atmosphere of the University of
Iowa. There the creative writing MFA students tutoring our freshman year
English composition courses told us not to concern ourselves with textbooks.

The change came after I had been accepted into service with the Canadian
powerhouse copy editing outfit, Scribendi something over a year ago. They fired
me shortly but not before I had downloaded their entire Rules of English
Composition for the Major Dialects course materials.

These rules I have steadfastly applied to the works whose titles I
attach which came from oDesk starting about a year ago, from business coming in
due to my abovementioned web page, and from certain Egyptian, Qatari, Saudi and
Lebanese translation services.

I wish to intern with you for some time, as needed, to focus on dealing
with shorter works and time frames.

I have had occasional comments accepted by Al-Ahram Weekly since
about 2007 and Ahram Online since 2011, though they were often poorly
proofed spits of rage as I limit my comments in the Middle East press (and
society generally) to topics concerning the utter barbarity of the government
of Israel and the utter uselessness of the government of the United States of
America in the region.

We will be away from Cairo 10-17 April celebrating the fifth anniversary
of our marriage. She is Reda Mohammad Mahmoud Hassan El Masry, lately retired
from Egyptian Telecom, Remaya Central.

Faithfully yours,

Jeffrey C. Marck جعفر

23 March 2014

So Cairo will
remember a snowy, wet winter. Snow during the storm that left a meter of snow
on Jerusalem, and regular rains for several months. Some years there is not a
single rain and some years just two. And of course it had been 120 years since
there had been snow.

For the
motorcyclist and other drivers it has meant a kind of mud of the finest sand
which isn’t in the least slippery. But it coats the vehicle which then needs
washing. That same sand on a dry day coats the car every overnight and during
the day. But the vehicles don’t get washed. The sand is wiped away with any
kind of cloth and clings to the cloth rather scratches the finish. The most
expensive cars in Cairo wake up to this same kind of treatment.

My friends were appalled
that I didn’t get the bike washed every day but we are going to Aswan 10 April
and would rather spend the money there.

Although I got all
the learning Arabic books the American University bookstore had when I came
back six years ago, there has been one that I found amongst them which has been
especially useful of late. Reda has never understood my questions… she can’t
produce the first person male verb conjugations unless reporting the speech of
a male.I gave up trying to get her to
do so. It interrupts her view of the TV to which she has been glued throughout
the revolution. There are dozens of channels putting their own spin on it. She
watches the state channels and looks forward to a military supreme leader
heading the nation. One who got elected and will have to stand for re-election.

When people ask if
she helps me with my Arabic I say, “No. I think she is waiting for God of come
down and…” that’s about all it takes. People begin shrieking with laughter.

The Arabic teaching
is in many places but it isn’t so much in the province of Giza. It’s all on the
Cairo side of the river. So I’ve never considered that.

Reda and I soon
learned to get the job done around the house. The only change in the last five
years has been the book I mentioned previously and she helps me with my
pronunciations as I practice the paradigms.

When people ask me about how much Arabic I speak, I start mentioning
familiar foods: “fasolia (a middle thickness bean soup – named after the
particular bean perhaps), molokhaya (prepared into a slime – non-Arabs
gag when eating it for the first time but learn eventually learn to focus on
its taste) bamia (okra), hobs (the generic word for bread) wa ersh
(the Egyptian favorite bread – round, flat… two layers baked togetheras disks and are the handheld sandwich
variety) wa fattah (ersh that has gone dry and is broken into pieces and
rehydrated and warmed like oatmeal on a cold winter’s day),” … with those words
they know that I live in an Arab household and become quite gay.

26 March 2014

I didn’t get a new
motorcycle 1 August as the copy editing business was slow through the summer.
And there was no birthday party for my motorcycle’s fifth birthday and no
lecture to the young blokes about wrecking their bikes and bipeddling again. I
never meant to.

So Cairo will
remember a snowy, wet winter. Snow during the storm that left a meter of snow
on Jerusalem, and regular rains for several months. Some years there is not a
single rain and some years just two. And of course it had been 120 years since
there had been snow.

For the
motorcyclist and other drivers it has meant a kind of mud of the finest sand
which isn’t in the least slippery. But it coats the vehicle which then needs
washing. That same sand on a dry day coats the car every overnight and during
the day. But the vehicles don’t get washed. The sand is wiped away with any
kind of cloth and clings to the cloth rather scratches the finish. The most
expensive cars in Cairo wake up to this same kind of treatment.

My friends were
appalled that I didn’t get the bike washed every day but we are going to Aswan
10 April and would rather spend the money there.

Although I got all
the learning Arabic books the American University bookstore had when I came
back six years ago, there has been one that I found amongst them which has been
especially useful of late. Reda has never understood my questions… she can’t
produce the first person male verb conjugations unless reporting the speech of
a male.I gave up trying to get her to
do so. It interrupts her view of the TV to which she has been glued throughout
the revolution. There are dozens of channels putting their own spin on it. She
watches the state channels and looks forward to a military supreme leader
heading the nation. One who got elected and will have to stand for re-election.

When people ask if
she helps me with my Arabic I say, “No. I think she is waiting for God of come
down and…” that’s about all it takes. People begin shrieking with laughter.

The Arabic teaching
is in many places but it isn’t so much in the province of Giza. It’s all on the
Cairo side of the river. So I’ve never considered that.

Reda and I soon
learned to get the job done around the house. The only change in the last five
years has been the book I mentioned previously and she helps me with my
pronunciations as I practice the paradigms.

When people ask me about how much Arabic I speak, I start mentioning
familiar foods: “fasolia (a middle thickness bean soup – named after the
particular bean perhaps), molokhaya (prepared into a slime – non-Arabs
gag when eating it for the first time but learn eventually learn to focus on
its taste) bamia (okra), hobs (the generic word for bread) wa ersh
(the Egyptian favorite bread – round, flat… two layers baked togetheras disks and are the handheld sandwich
variety) wa fattah (ersh that has gone dry and is broken into pieces and
rehydrated and warmed like oatmeal on a cold winter’s day),” … with those words
they know that I live in an Arab household and become quite gay.

So tomorrow is the fifth anniversary of the day Reda and I were
introduced – and her birthday as well – and I then began these missives.

The last thing I wrote about six months ago was so dark I regret
pushing the send button and waited for a day or preferably period of time when
things were going better all round and lately, indeed, they have been.

We are in the middle of a week in Aswan celebrating and there is
much to celebrate as a household. I’ve been a steady Five Star with the
outsourcing service I’ve been with for about year or most of a year. They have
a mixed system where jobs may be on a fixed fee or hourly basis and it seems to
be our hourly totals that give us more visibility to clients who want to find
their own freelancer rather than post the job description to the freelancers as
a whole. The hours climbed upward and upward and are finally doing me some good
as most of my jobs now come from direct offers from potential clients. A couple
letters I wrote are appended below that cover most of that ground.

I told Reda today that the next time we get a room at a hotel I
want one that comes with a donkey to carry back all the stuff she gets at the
market. She really loaded me down a couple days in a row and yesterday I told
her I wasn’t going to be carrying any big piles of stuff back to the hotel…
that she could get a taxi or whatever she wanted but it wasn’t going to be me
anymore. She gaily assumed I was kidding… but thence got to carry back the six
or eight kilos of bread she got for 80 cents and then had to spend yesterday
and today giving most of it away as it is more or less impossible for two
people to eat that much bread before it goes off. But the overarching issue is
now deceased… we’re up to our weight limit for the flight home so there won’t
be any more 2km walks from those markets with 10kg of the special dates they
grow here, etc.

There are only about two days of touristy things to do in Aswan…
the magnificence of the high dam and one of the monuments they relocated to
higher ground. We did that two days ago and then today we did the other
standard tour which is to a sparkling Nubian village across the river and a
fantastic botanical garden on an island in between. There are no bridges across
the Nile except for up at the old dam and the newer high dam which are far
enough away that they haven’t been a causeway for Aswan city to the other side
of the Nile and there the desert and traditional living begins at the shore

I think the creative writing bias in the late 1960s really kind of
hurt us at the University of Iowa.

The English composition teachers in our Freshman English mandatory
courses were graduate students, often from the world renowned International
Writers Workshop (Kurt Vonnegut and others, as I recall; I just looked up
Vonnegut and the Workshop on Wikipedia... there are photos of Vonnegut and I
recognized him instantly from around the campus although I didn't know at the
time that it was him).

All I remember is our TA's instruction in creative writing... if
there was a grammar of English textbook we were never told to open it.

So the first Canadian copy editing outsourcing people noticed that
I couldn't get everything done right on their demanding schedules and relegated
me to large works that occasionally come to them with long time lines. There,
from about a year ago, I put to good use their online manuals of the rules of
written English and the variances by major dialect.

And now I am a consistent five star with a larger but less
lucrative outfit. I attach a list of major works proofed or edited.

We were able to pay off all our personal debt from the revolution
by the end of last year and are now attacking the pile of pfennigs I owe the
CBA - and we will celebrate the fifth anniversary of our small
wedding in Cairo mid-April in Aswan. The anniversary of our introduction, actually
- which was on Reda's birthday. The wedding party and going home together for
the first time was mid-May and registration with the ministry was in June or
July.

In Aswan I will still have work coming in but we will be there a
week which is twice as long as needed to see most everything. There I will use
my shirttail relationship to the UI Writers Workshop to put out another
"Small Wedding in Cairo" missive. I was so distressed at how dark the
one last one was that I have been waiting for months to find myself in a better
mood. That comes and goes but there really hasn't been much news. The
revolution lumbers on...

I append some of the Wikipedia statements about the UI Writers
Workshop. It has a great pile of kudos that I was hardly aware of.

The great copy editor,

Jeff

"The program began in
1936, with the gathering of poets and fiction writers under the direction of Wilbur
Schramm. Graduates earn a Master
of Fine Arts degree in English; Iowa has the oldest program in the country
offering such a credential.[2]"
(Wikipedia 20140314)

"Faculty and graduates
affiliated with the Iowa Writers' Workshop have won 28 Pulitzer
Prizes, including 16 won by graduates since 1947, and graduates and
faculty of the University
of Iowa have won over 40.[4]"

If one Googles "english copy editing egypt" the first three
unpaid hits are your announcements of 9 May, 2013, 8 July, 2013 and 3 December,
2013. The fourth is mine. It is five years old.

With two and six month intervals in your placing such announcements I
wondered if there might be another one coming up sooner or later and if I might
resubmit an application for your files.

I first applied in person to Mr Hani Shukrallah in the weeks when your
operation was being set up some four or five years ago. He might well remember.
I badly flunked the test, "...both in terms of the time taken and the
quality..." As I did at The Egyptian Day as it was called at the
time.

Since then I have been wandering the wilderness and honing my skills. I
am now a Five Star proof-reader with the world's largest outsourcing web site,
www.oDesk.com, with a money back guarantee (which is guaranteed by oDesk in a
beta undertaking utilising their top performers).

One can go to the oDesk address and search for "Jeffrey Charles
Marck" for my profile and evidence of my Five Star rating and oDesk
guarantee.

4.92, actually... one two star from an aggressive youngster in Beirut
with a "translation company", disappointed that her $10 didn't go
further than it did. And one four star from a disorganised client in the UK,
disappointed that I said I was going to have to shift her from per-task to
hourly because she didn't appreciate what all the changes in the wind at her
end were costing my time.

I am a trained linguist with a PhD (The Institute, Australian
National University) but trained in descriptive and comparative linguistics
rather than formal English grammar. That I learnt rather lately. I'm from the
oft Pulitzer Prize winning Writer's Workshop atmosphere of the University of
Iowa. There the creative writing MFA students tutoring our freshman year
English composition courses told us not to concern ourselves with textbooks.

The change came after I had been accepted into service with the Canadian
powerhouse copy editing outfit, Scribendi something over a year ago. They fired
me shortly but not before I had downloaded their entire Rules of English
Composition for the Major Dialects course materials.

These rules I have steadfastly applied to the works whose titles I
attach which came from oDesk starting about a year ago, from business coming in
due to my abovementioned web page, and from certain Egyptian, Qatari, Saudi and
Lebanese translation services.

I wish to intern with you for some time, as needed, to focus on dealing
with shorter works and time frames.

I have had occasional comments accepted by Al-Ahram Weekly since
about 2007 and Ahram Online since 2011, though they were often poorly
proofed spits of rage as I limit my comments in the Middle East press (and
society generally) to topics concerning the utter barbarity of the government
of Israel and the utter uselessness of the government of the United States of
America in the region.

We will be away from Cairo 10-17 April celebrating the fifth anniversary
of our marriage. She is Reda Mohammad Mahmoud Hassan El Masry, lately retired
from Egyptian Telecom, Remaya Central.

So Cairo will
remember a snowy, wet winter. Snow during the storm that left a meter of snow
on Jerusalem, and regular rains for several months. Some years there is not a
single rain and some years just two. And of course it had been 120 years since
there had been snow.

For the
motorcyclist and other drivers it has meant a kind of mud of the finest sand
which isn’t in the least slippery. But it coats the vehicle which then needs
washing. That same sand on a dry day coats the car every overnight and during
the day. But the vehicles don’t get washed. The sand is wiped away with any
kind of cloth and clings to the cloth rather scratches the finish. The most
expensive cars in Cairo wake up to this same kind of treatment.

My friends were
appalled that I didn’t get the bike washed every day but we are going to Aswan
10 April and would rather spend the money there.

Although I got all
the learning Arabic books the American University bookstore had when I came
back six years ago, there has been one that I found amongst them which has been
especially useful of late. Reda has never understood my questions… she can’t
produce the first person male verb conjugations unless reporting the speech of
a male.I gave up trying to get her to
do so. It interrupts her view of the TV to which she has been glued throughout
the revolution. There are dozens of channels putting their own spin on it. She
watches the state channels and looks forward to a military supreme leader
heading the nation. One who got elected and will have to stand for re-election.

When people ask if
she helps me with my Arabic I say, “No. I think she is waiting for God of come
down and…” that’s about all it takes. People begin shrieking with laughter.

The Arabic teaching
is in many places but it isn’t so much in the province of Giza. It’s all on the
Cairo side of the river. So I’ve never considered that.

Reda and I soon
learned to get the job done around the house. The only change in the last five years
has been the book I mentioned previously and she helps me with my
pronunciations as I practice the paradigms.

When people ask me about how much Arabic I speak, I start mentioning
familiar foods: “fasolia (a middle thickness bean soup – named after the
particular bean perhaps), molokhaya (prepared into a slime – non-Arabs
gag when eating it for the first time but learn eventually learn to focus on
its taste) bamia (okra), hobs (the generic word for bread) wa ersh
(the Egyptian favorite bread – round, flat… two layers baked togetheras disks and are the handheld sandwich
variety) wa fattah (ersh that has gone dry and is broken into pieces and
rehydrated and warmed like oatmeal on a cold winter’s day),” … with those words
they know that I live in an Arab household and become quite gay.

I didn’t get a new
motorcycle 1 August as the copy editing business was slow through the summer.
And there was no birthday party for my motorcycle’s fifth birthday and no
lecture to the young blokes about wrecking their bikes and bipeddling again. I
never meant to.

We’ll be in Australia 12 September to 6 December to sort out my pension
details. We’ll be wanting to see Sydney, Melbourne and Adelaide in addition to
Canberra. I’ll turn 65 about two weeks before we come back to Egypt. And it
will be enough, with the American pension, prorated to my adult years in the
US, for us to live in the manner to which we would like to become accustomed.

Reda’s rooftop barnyard is growing a little faster than I would like. This
summer has been busy with copyediting and she tends to announce, post facto,
the arrival of new species and varieties that all need their own houses or
cages. Just today we have been finishing off yet another project about two
weeks or a month after the new critters arrived. She takes from the growing
pile of materials originating from abodes dismantled after new construction and
makes due temporarily, over-optimistic that I will one day begin to do these
things immediately upon need. But last night and more again tonight I saw the
depth and breadth of her new acquisitions and the results of multiple duckling
broods and a dead rabbit that I would guess was the result of heat and
over-crowding. I guess I’m supposed to better understand the urgency of these
situations with the dead bunny paraded around before me.

Reda tripped up on the roof and caught her fall with her right arm whereupon
her shoulder was dislocated. The x-ray looked like roundish cartilage from the
top of the humurus
had slipped out of position or something and a bit of internal bleeding has now
drained down to around her elbow and above. She has a good bit of pain but
soldiers on up on the roof. And she makes such small temporary hovels for some
of the species that I can’t get inside to give them fresh water so they don’t
have to fight for it out in the yard with their competitors.

We were going to sell the motorcycle when we left for Australia and get a
new one when we came back. But I think Reda’s motorcycling days are over… the
rooftop accident showing just how little it takes to injure her. The bike will
be six years old on Friday and still only costs $3 a day for all repairs, fuel
and licenses. Up from $2.50 a day before they quit subsidizing fuel so heavily.
The revolution hasn’t seen enough power plant expansion and we were having
daily blackouts, neighborhood by neighborhood, totaling about four hours a day
between the afternoon outage and the evening outage. But then from about four
weeks ago people started getting their new electricity bills reflecting the
first round of cuts in home power subsidies. The effects have been immediate.
Some days have no outages and some days there is just one for half an hour or
so. The roads and other utilities kept up with the growing demand through these
past three and a half years. The main thoroughfares have all been resurfaced in
the last year. The roads are plainly dangerous when it is delayed too long. Or
at least for a motorcycle as long ruts develop in the direction of travel,
trapping the motorcycle with no opportunity to find a way out of the ruts when
traffic around us shifts slightly to the left or right.

I’m at my friend Ibrahim’s paint shop where Reda’s cousin Assim and I take
our tea from the café (“qahua”) next door. Ibrahim’s youngest child, a teenage
girl, just popped her head in, scarfed in hijab. It reminded me to tell a
little bit of her story. She’s very tall. Not 185mm or six foot tall but the
tallest female on these neighborhoods’ streets. She’s very skinny and blossomed
last among her friends, only a few months ago. Her former status, “girl”, in
the neighborhood is a comment on how deeply such concepts penetrate into all
behavior on the street. Until she wore hijab full time she used to walk the
three blocks to her father’s shop in her long-sleeved pajamas and I think she’s
about 14 now… and this was up to just a few weeks ago. No man or boy harassed
her or even followed her with their eyes. She was just a girl and they just
didn’t/don’t.

Something on the way here tonight made me want to spin another neighborhood
yarn. There was a thud and then a restraining force on the transport box from
its location on the back of the bike and I knew it must be one of the four or
five boys I had just passed going the other way. I slammed on the rear brake
and put the bike into a slide so as to turn it about 180 degrees. One of the
boys I just passed stood out because he was right behind and now right in front
of the bike. His eyes went big, his jaw dropped and he took off with a start
running down the other side of the road, a small median strip between us. I
drove the wrong way on my side of the road, bellowing out, “El waled!!!” (“The
boy!!!”). Shopkeepers and passersby began walking onto the road and into his
path, slowing him down and saying two or three words that I couldn’t hear. With
a very few of these obstacles and their words, the boy stopped, turned my way
and began walking towards me. “What is your name?” I demanded. He told me
obediently… a name I had never heard before and can’t remember. “Ley keta?”
(“Why (are you acting like) this?”) He had no answer and I turned the bike back
to my original direction of travel and drove away. I guess the shopkeepers were
telling him, “You’re going to have to talk to him,” or something of the sort.
It made me wonder, as I often do, what a thief would face. The obvious, I
suppose… dozens of people sounding the alarm and seizing him.

So those are my Tales from Pyramids for the evening. But not to forget the
story of a new young friend. He is 25 and from England and staying at Assim’s
hotel. He went with me to Pyramids yesterday and he got a bit of a tour and
about eight hours of chicken coop construction up on the roof. I think we
finished at 2am or perhaps it was 2am when I got him back to the hotel. He
really threw his back into it and in the end Reda installed her overcrowded
rabbit apartment cages in the coop we made and announced that she would need a
different, additional, home for the chickens. The saga continues...

"The safest ecoforest is one that is also a
treasured source of carbohydrate."
"Breadfruit! You can have your ecoforest and eat it, too!"
"Money doesn't grow on trees but a certain kind of bread flour
does..."
"You don't see the Pacific Islanders cutting down their ecoforests! It's
all breadfruit!"

High all. We are
back in Pyramids feeding the rooftop fowl. The rabbits all died when we were
away so Reda bought into a new duck variety and they took over the rabbit
run.Reda’s father was an iron worker,
making huge entry gates for villa properties and such, just as her Alexandria
El Masry cousins do today. But like Reda’s oldest sister, her mother was a
farmer. Women own their own farmland or rent some and choose their own crops.
They lived in a small cluster of buildings in a rural area near El Minya , the
men like her father with a trade and the women like her mother farming and
then, of course, the men who farmed and the women who worked in shops or
taught… that and nursing the main female professions much things were in
America when I was growing up.

In any event,
Reda’s just awfully happy to have some farm animals to be fussing around with
and is still over there long days and evenings waiting for tradesmen to show up
as they are now finishing the interiors of their sixth and seventh floor flats
that they will now be renting out sometime soon.

Her female cousins
through their mother’s sister were in the first generation of women MDs when a
more of them were moving into general practice. That existed previously among
the fabulously wealthy but moved en masse to the population of average people
during Abdel Nasser’s presidency when so many universities were built or
expanded and became free to those who placed high enough in the entrance
examinations.

And once again I’ll
tell the story of Reda through those times. Like legions of 35 year old
Egyptian women today, she got a good education, she got a good job, and she
never got married. Before the revolution it was sort of a national press
pastime to review the parents’ angst when having a 35 year old daughter still
living at home and the unsuitable suitors they paraded through her life year
after year. That kind of jovial writing disappeared immediately upon the
beginning of the revolution.

I wouldn’t know for
the last year or more. Al Jazeera so bemoaned the removal of the “legitimate”
Muslim Brotherhood president that I got cheesed off and quit watching it. And
since that was the only news I watched I’ve just been getting out of touch. It
was disgusting to watch the AJ reporters hyping the “legitimacy” pitch with
respect to the deposed, and looking all the time like they either didn’t
believe what they were saying or were afraid to be saying what they were
saying;the coup d’état government
eventually arresting three AJ journalists who were hardly the worst, trying
them and sentencing them to years in prison.

They’ve been in
jail for right about a year now, AJ doing hourly postings on how many days
they’ve been in jail. I’m finally condescending to tune in for an hour or two
every day, benefiting from their world news and feature stories, and wandering
off to the Internet when they begin their hand-wringing about their jailed
staff. What did they expect? Only the 25% of the population who are Muslim
Brothers would be thanking them. They lost their other 26%, the Salafi
religious conservatives, after the Salafi got the Muslim Brotherhood candidate
elected… only to see the MB discard their Salafi advisors soon after the
election, through the drafting of the new MB constitution, and all the way up
to the time the MB president was deposed.

In the Egyptian
judicial system the AJ reporters haven’t had a trial yet that must consider
evidence – or lack of it. The three have just had a preliminary hearing,
really, whose often outrageous convictions and sentences are overturned on
first or second appeal. Evidence counts for little in the initial trial. It’s
the appeals courts that actually begin to consider evidence. But the hatred for
Al Jazeera now runs deep in Egypt and the judiciary may drag it out through
several rounds of appeals. They may drag it out longer than the initial
sentences if AJ doesn’t do a better job of taking the pulse of Egypt.

In the meantime
Qatar, AJ’s parent country / government, does a lot of things to keep the
Egyptian government afloat financially. Go figure.

For myself I spent
the last year and more expanding my good reputation at www.oDesk.com

I did well enough
last year to pay off a good chunk of our revolutionary debt and this year looks
better. Although there is now more debt. I telephoned the pension office was
told that I qualified for the Australian aged pension so we flew off to
Australia for my 65th birthday to make the required personal
appearance. I flunked due to question #1: residence (in Egypt). They knew
during my queries that I was living in Egypt. Possibly they assumed that I knew
there are “agreement” countries. If, for instance, I was living in Greece or
the United States I would get the Australian pension but not if one is living
in Egypt or the UK. This would flunk the “equal protection under the law”
principles in the US courts but Australian citizens apparently don’t have that
same guarantee.

Oh, well… it was
time to get back anyway. It had been over six years. And the prices have risen
massively and cured Reda of any notion of spending extended periods of time
there. Probably our next trip will be to both Australia and America such that
we catch my high school graduation 50 year reunion in 2018. The rejection of my
Australian pension application was a massive shock but Australia gave me
education and opportunity and I’m finding it hard to feel bitter.

A couple days ago I
was up to 6 am copy editing a piece on Muslim Georgians emigrating to Turkey in
the late 19th Century. I was really engrossed as I knew nothing of
the kind of stuff hundreds of years ago that led up to the current Crimea
crisis, etc. I woke up at 2 pm and drove into town amazed that all the water
mains had burst. How could there possibly be enough pressure in the system to
do that? But there were great pools of water all over the roads under which the
mains run. And down the small side streets that I take to meet Reda’s cousin
Assim every day or two… unpaved and muddy. The tea arrived and someone asked me
what I thought of the rain. It hadn’t even occurred to me. I don’t know that
there was a single day of rain in the twelve months before. There are some
years when there just isn’t any. So what can I say? I missed the first rainy
day in yonks because of working past midnight with materials on Georgia. It’s
had the song, “A Rainy Night in Georgia” pushing its way into my consciousness
ever since.

Then there is the
story since we got back from Australia of a much older boy, twenty or
twenty-five-ish who seemed to think he was going to be king of the castle.
Before we went to Australia, I had told the young men who work at the grocery
store and fruit and vegetable stand on the ground floor that if the bike was
still here when we got back, I would give them 500 Egyptian pounds to share
among themselves (~75US$). Well it was right where I left it and they got their
500 pounds. So when the 20s-ish boy mentioned above did some of the things he
did, the shop crews were all on my side, which probably would have been true
anyway. The twentyish fellow was very big. Taller than me and looking strong
enough to do damage and with the new kind of haircut where they cut the hair
close around the sides and back and grease and comb what’s left into an apex up
on top.

I first saw him one
morning as I was walking down the front stairway as he removed himself from the
seat of my bike where he had been sitting, me watching as I walked past him holding
up my right index finger, ticking it from right to left as the Egyptians do
rather than saying, “No,” or “Don’t”.

Same story the next
morning when I spoke to him for the first time saying, “Da min beytak?” (“That
(bike) is from your house?”) “La’a,” (“No,”) he answered, looking sheepish for
an instant but then seeming to have a thought or word that he kept to himself.
On the other occasion he was gone when I returned from a shop across the street
and down 100 yards. On this occasion he had apparently remained and had
something up his sleeve because when I returned from the other shop this time
one of the young army conscript policemen in their special uniform came running
towards me from across the street. “So that’s it,” I thought. “The young punk is
present and up to no good.”

I nodded my head to
the policeman and signaled him, “Let’s go,” with my hand and arm. He fell in
behind me and when we turned the corner towards the stairwell past the grocery
shop there was the big young bloke under discussion standing on a wide part of
the first step up with another large youth and four or five more were standing
on the entrance landing five steps higher. He had apparently called them to
join him on his mobile and meant to announce to me that this was going to be
their hangout from then on or something.

They weren’t from
our building. From the moment I saw him I walked directly at him, and with the
policeman nanoseconds behind they all stood still and held their peace. When I
reached the donkey’s pituey under discussion, I remained on the pavement below
the first step he was on, looked up at him, and said plainly, loud enough,
matter of factly, and quickly, “Inta mish gai tani fil amara hena,” (“You’re
not coming to this building anymore.”) No other words seemed necessary so I
walked up the steps and entered the building leaving the policeman to deal with
the formalities. He apparently did so and I’ve never seen the little shit in
question again. Nor has the bike been tampered with or anything (it’s always
parked right next to the grocery store which is open 24 hours a day).

This was my only
encounter with that kind of trouble or any other after living in Egypt for most
of seven years or something like that… but for the disappearance of a large box
of Reda’s clothes when we were changing apartments about five years ago.
Possibly the police went to his home and told his parents or something. The
policeman who accompanied me is part of a shifting landscape of personnel who I
may or may not ever see again. Perhaps the young men who man the shops below
know and perhaps I will ask them one day. For the moment I amuse them upon
request with recitation of what exactly I said to the would-be gang leader.
They didn’t want him hanging around, either.

In the mid-1950s
there was the Captain Kangaroo television show for those of us growing up in
America, an apparently old gentleman in a kind of captain’s uniform with big
pockets, the source of his name – huge pockets on each side of his coat like
the pouch of a kangaroo. Looking to Wikipedia for some context as I was too
young to appreciate that it was becoming a national institution, the show ran
from 1955 to 1984. So our kids grew up with it too. I wouldn’t have known as I
was away from America so much and the later years entirely escaped me, Bob
Keeshan (Captain Kangaroo)being much
younger than the grandfatherly figure he played from the early years on.

I remember one of
his regular guests quite well. He had a single routine which just seemed like
magic and it would go on for five or ten minutes. He was the Banana Man (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=et6Jt2YX44o)
and at the age six and seven I used to watch him closely as I thought there was
some illusion I was missing… that was tricking me… as his routine involved
filling a sting of cars in a train that he pulled one out of the other, each
one just smaller than the next, which all fit inside the biggest one which was
about the size of a large sea chest. He filled all the chests from things he
carried in his coat pockets and I couldn’t believe it was possible that he
could fill his coats with such a quantity of things and that I wasn’t quick
enough to see where it was all really coming from.

Reda’s sister’s
bedroom is a bit like the Banana Man’s garments. She brings stuff out onto the
lounge room floor for organizing that is of such quantity, individually, that
it’s difficult to believe it all comes from the same room after seeing her
cycle through what seems like five and ten such projects every month or two.
Clothes… which is what is has been this last week due to the change of weather…
boxes and boxes of personal papers which is the case on a seasonal or other
cycle of some sort.

One year she
decided to downsize her archives when a community service gamea (non-profit… informal in most instances) came around asking
for reading materials for school children. She had a lot of relevant materials
and teacher’s manuals as well, saved from here career in Saudi Arabia which
made her rich enough to begin construction on the apartment building they are
now finishing after building it floor by floor for 25 years and more. But she
also sent off a folder that contained their property titles for some small
plots of land they own here and there. Most of it so far from the town center
that paved roads still don’t reach them. They take Assim, the patient cousin
who introduced Reda and myself, to view the properties from time to time rather
than me. Or rather, he takes them when they ask every few of years.

So Zuba sent off
all the property titles five years ago or more when the gamea requested any
type of reading material. So the next time Zuba went looking for them she
realized what she must have done, she still had the mobile number of the gamea
member who came to pick up the materials she had set aside for them, it was
still a working number, and they got Assim to take them to a sort of a
warehouse where the gamea kept the donated materials. Assim described it as a
very, very large facility in the sense of ever finding their own contributions
in such a mass of shelves of materials. So they gave up hope of ever seeing
them again and have been content to visit the properties concerned every year
or two to make sure no one else is building on them… which has never been found
to be the case… and they had no other records of the properties’ parcel
numbers… so they’d not gone down to the land office to start the process of
getting duplicate titles. Or rather certified duplicates of the bills of sale
which is what the land office actually holds. They don’t issue titles in the
sense of what I am familiar with from America and Australia. And they were
saying something to the effect that they would not have gotten the certified
copies unless they got a release from the person from whom they had bought the
land… some kind of deception-prevention measure… so they would have had to find
all these people from whom they had bought the various plots who in no case did
they personally know… and many or most may be dead by now… so they stuck with
the occasional visits to the properties to see if anybody was messin’ with ‘em.

Parenthetically,
yet another system is how a lot of Palestinians are losing their land on the
West Bank. The old Ottoman Empire system was still in place up to the time of
the 1967 war. Land belonged to whoever was paying taxes on it. They were rights
of usage. People could go to the government in terms of farmland for their
children or their own expanding needs and request that some unused land they
were aware of be allotted for their use and as long as no one else was paying
the taxes… and then as long as they paid them, it was theirs to use. So
Palestinians today in some instances have 200 year old olive groves and such
that their ancestors and themselves have been paying taxes on through the
Ottoman then Jordanian generations and the Israeli government comes in with
bulldozers and rips out their orchards, saying it didn’t belong to anybody
anyway. Al Jazeera had an interesting series of episodes a couple years ago
about Israel’s young people who pack up and leave Israel after doing military
service there… traumatized by the things they were made to do to such
Palestinians by the Israeli government.

But the El Masry
sister’s needn’t have worried. They live amongst kinder, gentler people. They
got a phone call in the middle of last year. The gamea to which Zuba had given
the teacher manuals, other books, and property records pass on the materials
they can’t use to other people who look through them for things that might
interest people they know and one of
them came upon land contracts, i.e., Zuba and Reda’s copies of the land office
records. One of them got Zuba and Reda’s purchase contracts and found Zuba in
the land line phone book. That gentleman called her up to ask if she had any
need of them. So it was a happy day when they called Assim to ask if he could
take them to the gentleman and pick up the documents… all things come to he who
waits… perhaps not… but in Egypt they sometimes do.

We’ll be in Australia 12 September to 6 December to sort out my pension
details. We’ll be wanting to see Sydney, Melbourne and Adelaide in addition to
Canberra. I’ll turn 65 about two weeks before we come back to Egypt. And it
will be enough, with the American pension, prorated to my adult years in the
US, for us to live in the manner to which we would like to become accustomed.

Reda’s rooftop barnyard is growing a little faster than I would like. This
summer has been busy with copyediting and she tends to announce, post facto,
the arrival of new species and varieties that all need their own houses or
cages. Just today we have been finishing off yet another project about two
weeks or a month after the new critters arrived. She takes from the growing
pile of materials originating from abodes dismantled after new construction and
makes due temporarily, over-optimistic that I will one day begin to do these
things immediately upon need rather than continuing with my schedule of
servicing copy editing commitments properly. But last night and more again
tonight I saw the depth and breadth of her new acquisitions and the results of
multiple duckling broods and a dead rabbit that I would guess was the result of
heat and over-crowding. I guess I’m supposed to better understand the urgency
of these situations with the dead bunny paraded around before me.

Reda tripped up on the roof and caught her fall with her right arm whereupon
her shoulder was dislocated. The x-ray looked like roundish cartilage from the
top of the humerus had slipped out of position or something and a bit of
internal bleeding has now drained down to around her elbow and above. She has a
good bit of pain but soldiers on up on the roof. And she makes such small
temporary hovels for some of the species that I can’t get inside to give them
fresh water so they don’t have to fight for it out in the yard with their
competitors.

We were going to sell the motorcycle when we left for Australia and get a
new one when we came back. But I think Reda’s motorcycling days are over… the
rooftop accident showing just how little it takes to injure her. The bike will
be six years old on Friday and still only costs $3 a day for all repairs, fuel
and licenses. Up from $2.50 a day before they quit subsidizing fuel so heavily.
The revolution hasn’t seen enough power plant expansion and we were having
daily blackouts, neighborhood by neighborhood, totaling about four hours a day
between the afternoon outage and the evening outage. But then from about four
weeks ago people started getting their new electricity bills reflecting the
first round of cuts in home power subsidies. The effects have been immediate.
Some days have no outages and some days there is just one for half an hour or
so. The roads and other utilities kept up with the growing demand through these
past three and a half years. The main thoroughfares have all been resurfaced in
the last year. The roads are plainly dangerous when it is delayed too long. Or
at least for a motorcycle as long ruts develop in the direction of travel,
trapping the motorcycle with no opportunity to find a way out of the ruts when
traffic around us shifts slightly to the left or right.

I’m at my friend Ibrahim’s paint shop where Reda’s cousin Assim and I take
our tea from the café (“qahua”) next door. Ibrahim’s youngest child, a teenage
girl, just popped her head in, scarfed in hijab. It reminded me to tell a
little bit of her story. She’s very tall. Not 185mm or six foot tall but the
tallest female on these neighborhoods’ streets. She’s very skinny and blossomed
last among her friends, only a few months ago. Her former status, “girl”, in
the neighborhood is a comment on how deeply such concepts penetrate into all
behavior on the street. Until she wore hijab full time she used to walk the
three blocks to her father’s shop in her long-sleeved pajamas and I think she’s
about 14 now… and this was up to just a few weeks ago. No man or boy harassed
her or even followed her with their eyes. She was just a girl and they just
didn’t/don’t.

Something on the way here tonight made me want to spin another neighborhood
yarn. There was a thud and then a restraining force on the transport box from its
location on the back of the bike and I knew it must be one of the four or five
boys I had just passed going the other way. I slammed on the rear brake and put
the bike into a slide so as to turn it about 180 degrees. One of the boys I
just passed stood out because he was right behind and now right in front of the
bike. His eyes went big, his jaw dropped and he took off with a start running
down the other side of the road, a small median strip between us. I drove the
wrong way on my side of the road, bellowing out, “El waled!!!” (“The boy!!!”).
Shopkeepers and passersby began walking onto the road and into his path,
slowing him down and saying two or three words that I couldn’t hear. With a
very few of these obstacles and their words, the boy stopped, turned my way and
began walking towards me. “What is your name?” I demanded. He told me
obediently… a name I had never heard before and can’t remember. “Ley keta?”
(“Why (are you acting like) this?”) He had no answer and I turned the bike back
to my original direction of travel and drove away. I guess the shopkeepers were
telling him, “You’re going to have to talk to him,” or something of the sort.
It made me wonder, as I often do, what a thief would face. The obvious, I
suppose… dozens of people sounding the alarm and seizing him.

So those are my Tales from Pyramids for the evening. But not to forget the
story of a new young friend. He is 25 and from England and staying at Assim’s
hotel. He went with me to Pyramids yesterday and he got a bit of a tour and
about eight hours of chicken coop construction up on the roof. I think we
finished at 2am or perhaps it was 2am when I got him back to the hotel. He
really threw his back into it and in the end Reda installed her overcrowded
rabbit apartment cages in the coop we made and announced that she would need a
different, additional, home for the chickens. The saga continues...

"The safest ecoforest is one that is also a
treasured source of carbohydrate."
"Breadfruit! You can have your ecoforest and eat it, too!"
"Money doesn't grow on trees but a certain kind of bread flour
does..."
"You don't see the Pacific Islanders cutting down their ecoforests! It's
all breadfruit!"

High all. We are
back in Pyramids feeding the rooftop fowl. The rabbits all died when we were
away so Reda bought into a new duck variety and they took over the rabbit
run.Reda’s father was an iron worker,
making huge entry gates for villa properties and such, just as her Alexandria
El Masry cousins do today. But like Reda’s oldest sister, her mother was a
farmer. Women own their own farmland or rent some and choose their own crops.
They lived in a small cluster of buildings in a rural area near El Minya , the
men like her father with a trade and the women like her mother farming and
then, of course, the men who farmed and the women who worked in shops or
taught… that and nursing the main female professions much things were in
America when I was growing up.

In any event,
Reda’s just awfully happy to have some farm animals to be fussing around with
and is still over there long days and evenings waiting for tradesmen to show up
as they are now finishing the interiors of their sixth and seventh floor flats
that they will now be renting out sometime soon.

Her female cousins
through their mother’s sister were in the first generation of women MDs when a
more of them were moving into general practice. That existed previously among
the fabulously wealthy but moved en masse to the population of average people
during Abdel Nasser’s presidency when so many universities were built or expanded
and became free to those who placed high enough in the entrance examinations.

And once again I’ll
tell the story of Reda through those times. Like legions of 35 year old
Egyptian women today, she got a good education, she got a good job, and she
never got married. Before the revolution it was sort of a national press
pastime to review the parents’ angst when having a 35 year old daughter still
living at home and the unsuitable suitors they paraded through her life year
after year. That kind of jovial writing disappeared immediately upon the
beginning of the revolution.

I wouldn’t know for
the last year or more. Al Jazeera so bemoaned the removal of the “legitimate”
Muslim Brotherhood president that I got cheesed off and quit watching it. And
since that was the only news I watched I’ve just been getting out of touch. It
was disgusting to watch the AJ reporters hyping the “legitimacy” pitch with
respect to the deposed, and looking all the time like they either didn’t
believe what they were saying or were afraid to be saying what they were
saying;the coup d’état government
eventually arresting three AJ journalists who were hardly the worst, trying
them and sentencing them to years in prison.

They’ve been in
jail for right about a year now, AJ doing hourly postings on how many days
they’ve been in jail. I’m finally condescending to tune in for an hour or two
every day, benefiting from their world news and feature stories, and wandering
off to the Internet when they begin their hand-wringing about their jailed
staff. What did they expect? Only the 25% of the population who are Muslim
Brothers would be thanking them. They lost their other 26%, the Salafi
religious conservatives, after the Salafi got the Muslim Brotherhood candidate
elected… only to see the MB discard their Salafi advisors soon after the
election, through the drafting of the new MB constitution, and all the way up
to the time the MB president was deposed.

In the Egyptian
judicial system the AJ reporters haven’t had a trial yet that must consider
evidence – or lack of it. The three have just had a preliminary hearing,
really, whose often outrageous convictions and sentences are overturned on
first or second appeal. Evidence counts for little in the initial trial. It’s
the appeals courts that actually begin to consider evidence. But the hatred for
Al Jazeera now runs deep in Egypt and the judiciary may drag it out through
several rounds of appeals. They may drag it out longer than the initial
sentences if AJ doesn’t do a better job of taking the pulse of Egypt.

In the meantime
Qatar, AJ’s parent country / government, does a lot of things to keep the
Egyptian government afloat financially. Go figure.

For myself I spent
the last year and more expanding my good reputation at www.oDesk.com

I did well enough
last year to pay off a good chunk of our revolutionary debt and this year looks
better. Although there is now more debt. I telephoned the pension office was
told that I qualified for the Australian aged pension so we flew off to
Australia for my 65th birthday to make the required personal
appearance. I flunked due to question #1: residence (in Egypt). They knew
during my queries that I was living in Egypt. Possibly they assumed that I knew
there are “agreement” countries. If, for instance, I was living in Greece or
the United States I would get the Australian pension but not if one is living
in Egypt or the UK. This would flunk the “equal protection under the law”
principles in the US courts but Australian citizens apparently don’t have that
same guarantee.

Oh, well… it was
time to get back anyway. It had been over six years. And the prices have risen
massively and cured Reda of any notion of spending extended periods of time
there. Probably our next trip will be to both Australia and America such that
we catch my high school graduation 50 year reunion in 2018. The rejection of my
Australian pension application was a massive shock but Australia gave me
education and opportunity and I’m finding it hard to feel bitter.

A couple days ago I
was up to 6 am copy editing a piece on Muslim Georgians emigrating to Turkey in
the late 19th Century. I was really engrossed as I knew nothing of
the kind of stuff hundreds of years ago that led up to the current Crimea
crisis, etc. I woke up at 2 pm and drove into town amazed that all the water
mains had burst. How could there possibly be enough pressure in the system to
do that? But there were great pools of water all over the roads under which the
mains run. And down the small side streets that I take to meet Reda’s cousin
Assim every day or two… unpaved and muddy. The tea arrived and someone asked me
what I thought of the rain. It hadn’t even occurred to me. I don’t know that
there was a single day of rain in the twelve months before. There are some
years when there just isn’t any. So what can I say? I missed the first rainy
day in yonks because of working past midnight with materials on Georgia. It’s
had the song, “A Rainy Night in Georgia” pushing its way into my consciousness
ever since.

When you have
occasion to ponder polygamy, kindly remember the story of our friend Alaa
(ęlęę). It isn’t an everyday story but neither, in Pyramids, is polygamy; so
lend an ear.

Alaa was married
for about forty years to a woman who bore no child. And from about fifth and
certainly the tenth year there were two clear options. Divorce because female
infertility is grounds for divorce. And the second, of course was to take a
second wife… or a third, so the law goes. And for thirty years and more friends
and acquaintances pointed out those options from time to time.

He did neither. And
he outlived her. She died some three or four years ago and he remarried a year
or two later… and has a son of about two years who is now let out on the street
to share the day or evening with his father who is more of a gentle
grandfather, of course. Whose delight is immeasurable.

Where I sometimes
wonder about the virtue of playing the hearts card game on the computer for two
and three hours a day, I have only to think of Alaa, who works on crossword
puzzles about three hours a night, sitting in a chair outside the door of his
school supplies shop, across the three or four meter wide street and one
property to the right from Ibrahim’s paint shop where they bring us tea from
the café next door to the left, Alaa joining us once an hour or so for a cup of
tea. To say Alaa is well respected is too weak a compliment but I can think of
none better at the moment.

Then there is the
story since we got back from Australia of a much older boy, twenty or
twenty-five-ish who seemed to think he was going to be king of the castle.
Before we went to Australia, I had told the young men who work at the grocery
store and fruit and vegetable stand on the ground floor that if the bike was
still here when we got back, I would give them 500 Egyptian pounds to share
among themselves (~75US$). Well it was right where I left it and they got their
500 pounds. So when the 20s-ish boy mentioned above did some of the things he
did, the shop crews were all on my side, which probably would have been true
anyway. The twentyish fellow was very big. Taller than me and looking strong enough
to do damage and with the new kind of haircut where they cut the hair close
around the sides and back and grease and comb what’s left into an apex up on
top.

I first saw him one
morning as I was walking down the front stairway as he removed himself from the
seat of my bike where he had been sitting, me watching as I walked past him
holding up my right index finger, ticking it from right to left as the
Egyptians do rather than saying, “No,” or “Don’t”.

Same story the next
morning when I spoke to him for the first time saying, “Da min beytak?” (“That
(bike) is from your house?”) “La’a,” (“No,”) he answered, looking sheepish for
an instant but then seeming to have a thought or word that he kept to himself.
On the other occasion he was gone when I returned from a shop across the street
and down 100 yards. On this occasion he had apparently remained and had
something up his sleeve because when I returned from the other shop this time
one of the young army conscript policemen in their special uniform came running
towards me from across the street. “So that’s it,” I thought. “The young punk
is present and up to no good.”

I nodded my head to
the policeman and signaled him, “Let’s go,” with my hand and arm. He fell in
behind me and when we turned the corner towards the stairwell past the grocery
shop there was the big young bloke under discussion standing on a wide part of
the first step up with another large youth and four or five more were standing
on the entrance landing five steps higher. He had apparently called them to
join him on his mobile and meant to announce to me that this was going to be
their hangout from then on or something.

They weren’t from
our building. From the moment I saw him I walked directly towards him, and with
the policeman nanoseconds behind they all stood still and held their peace.
When I reached the donkey’s pituey under discussion, I remained on the pavement
below the first step he was on, looked up at him, and said plainly, loud
enough, matter of factly, and quickly, “Inta mish gai tani fil amara hena,”
(“You’re not coming to this building anymore.”) No other words seemed necessary
so I walked up the steps and entered the building leaving the policeman to deal
with the formalities. He apparently did so and I’ve never seen the little shit
in question again. Nor has the bike been tampered with or anything (it’s always
parked right next to the grocery store which is open 24 hours a day).

This was my only
encounter with that kind of trouble or any other after living in Egypt for most
of seven years or something like that… but for the disappearance of a large box
of Reda’s clothes when we were changing apartments about five years ago.
Possibly the police went to his home and told his parents or something. The
policeman who accompanied me is part of a shifting landscape of personnel who I
may or may not ever see again. Perhaps the young men who man the shops below
know and perhaps I will ask them one day. For the moment I amuse them upon
request with recitation of what exactly I said to the would-be gang leader.
They didn’t want him hanging around, either.

In the mid-1950s
there was the Captain Kangaroo television show for those of us growing up in
America, an apparently old gentleman in a kind of captain’s uniform with big
pockets, the source of his name – huge pockets on each side of his coat like
the pouch of a kangaroo. Looking to Wikipedia for some context as I was too young
to appreciate that it was becoming a national institution, the show ran from
1955 to 1984. So our kids grew up with it too. I wouldn’t have known as I was
away from America so much and the later years entirely escaped me, Bob Keeshan
(Captain Kangaroo)being much younger
than the grandfatherly figure he played from the early years on.

I remember one of
his regular guests quite well. He had a single routine which just seemed like
magic and it would go on for five or ten minutes. He was the Banana Man (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=et6Jt2YX44o)
and at the age six and seven I used to watch him closely as I thought there was
some illusion I was missing… that was tricking me… as his routine involved
filling a sting of cars in a train that he pulled one out of the other, each
one just smaller than the next, which all fit inside the biggest one which was
about the size of a large sea chest. He filled all the chests from things he
carried in his coat pockets and I couldn’t believe it was possible that he
could fill his coats with such a quantity of things and that I wasn’t quick
enough to see where it was all really coming from.

Reda’s sister’s
bedroom is a bit like the Banana Man’s garments. She brings stuff out onto the
lounge room floor for organizing that is of such quantity, individually, that
it’s difficult to believe it all comes from the same room after seeing her
cycle through what seems like five and ten such projects every month or two.
Clothes… which is what is has been this last week due to the change of weather…
boxes and boxes of personal papers which is the case on a seasonal or other
cycle of some sort.

One year she
decided to downsize her archives when a community service gamea (non-profit… informal in most instances) came around asking
for reading materials for school children. She had a lot of relevant materials
and teacher’s manuals as well, saved from here career in Saudi Arabia which
made her rich enough to begin construction on the apartment building they are
now finishing after building it floor by floor for 25 years and more. But she
also sent off a folder that contained their property titles for some small
plots of land they own here and there. Most of it so far from the town center
that paved roads still don’t reach them. They take Assim, the patient cousin
who introduced Reda and myself, to view the properties from time to time rather
than me. Or rather, he takes them when they ask every few of years.

So Zuba sent off
all the property titles five years ago or more when the gamea requested any
type of reading material. So the next time Zuba went looking for them she
realized what she must have done, she still had the mobile number of the gamea
member who came to pick up the materials she had set aside for them, it was
still a working number, and they got Assim to take them to a sort of a
warehouse where the gamea kept the donated materials. Assim described it as a
very, very large facility in the sense of ever finding their own contributions
in such a mass of shelves of materials. So they gave up hope of ever seeing
them again and have been content to visit the properties concerned every year
or two to make sure no one else is building on them… which has never been found
to be the case… and they had no other records of the properties’ parcel
numbers… so they’d not gone down to the land office to start the process of
getting duplicate titles. Or rather certified duplicates of the bills of sale
which is what the land office actually holds. They don’t issue titles in the
sense of what I am familiar with from America and Australia. And they were
saying something to the effect that they would not have gotten the certified
copies unless they got a release from the person from whom they had bought the
land… some kind of deception-prevention measure… so they would have had to find
all these people from whom they had bought the various plots who in no case did
they personally know… and many or most may be dead by now… so they stuck with
the occasional visits to the properties to see if anybody was messin’ with ‘em.

Parenthetically,
yet another system is how a lot of Palestinians are losing their land on the
West Bank. The old Ottoman Empire system was still in place up to the time of
the 1967 war. Land belonged to whoever was paying taxes on it. They were rights
of usage. People could go to the government in terms of farmland for their
children or their own expanding needs and request that some unused land they
were aware of be allotted for their use and as long as no one else was paying
the taxes… and then as long as they paid them, it was theirs to use. So
Palestinians today in some instances have 200 year old olive groves and such
that their ancestors and themselves have been paying taxes on through the
Ottoman then Jordanian generations and the Israeli government comes in with
bulldozers and rips out their orchards, saying it didn’t belong to anybody
anyway. Al Jazeera had an interesting series of episodes a couple years ago
about Israel’s young people who pack up and leave Israel after doing military
service there… traumatized by the things they were made to do to such
Palestinians by the Israeli government.

But the El Masry
sister’s needn’t have worried. They live amongst kinder, gentler people. They
got a phone call in the middle of last year. The gamea to which Zuba had given
the teacher manuals, other books, and property records pass on the materials
they can’t use to other people who look through them for things that might
interest people they know and one of
them came upon land contracts, i.e., Zuba and Reda’s copies of the land office
records. One of them got Zuba and Reda’s purchase contracts and found Zuba in
the land line phone book. That gentleman called her up to ask if she had any
need of them. So it was a happy day when they called Assim to ask if he could
take them to the gentleman and pick up the documents… all things come to he who
waits… perhaps not… but in Egypt they sometimes do.

Zuba, Reda’s
sister, broke her arm about ten days ago and Reda had been over there
continuously. We’re all getting a bit old. Reda’s broken shoulder six or eight
months ago from a small fall and now Zuba’s broken arm for the same reason.

Then I was suddenly
housebound from about five days ago for fear of getting too distant from a
toilet. Then I (quickly) went to emergency at 3am Thursday due to discomfort,
worsening general gut pain, and concern. They gave me a certain treatment and
told me to come back at 10am. But I went to sleep and didn’t wake up til noon.
They were doing end of the day clean up by the time I woke up and arrived.

So Reda came home
and took care of me until we went to the hospital together this morning. I had
taken antibiotics over the Friday day of rest for and they eliminated my fever.
But other issues remain and I am to have several tests in the coming days and
be seen again a week from today. They charged me nothing for the visit to
emergency visit two days ago and $6 for the 5 minutes with the specialist
today. The only new medication I began taking today costs fifty US cents a day.
One other medication recommended by our pharmacist yesterday had already
eliminated most of my symptoms by this morning.

Reda went back to
take care of Zuba and I went to bed after the hospital this morning. The
seventh anniversary of our introduction is April 15 and we both consider it a
momentous occasion that led to great happiness in difficult times. We’ve talked
about it quite a bit in the last few days.

My little brother,
the accountant, paid off most of our revolutionary debt, or perhaps his wife
did mostly… she of the Edison laboratories’ John Kreusi’s clan. His name is
still on the door of his office in what is now the Menlo Park Museum in
Detroit. I’ve seen it myself. My father was also from Detroit and all the Marck
kids saw it in the 50s and 60s when our parents took us there again and again.

Next year we will
have paid off the rest our evolutionary debt by 15 April and will be making
small purchases of gold again. For Reda. Arab men don’t wear gold, I probably
mentioned some years ago.

So Reda went back
to take care of Zuba tonight and I was full of energy for the first time in
about a week. So I went to see Ibrahim the painter who was at home and in bed.

The eczema on his
hand palms really doesn’t seem much better after four months though he always
says it is improving. It’s really massive and seems an enormous discomfort for
him. And he’s just had abdominal surgery of some sort. Prostate, perhaps,
because he talks about a condition extending back 20 years, but I don’t have
the vocabulary to grasp the whole story. And I’m six or eight weeks older than
him. It gives one pause.

One story about
Ibrahim I want to tell involves a ~30 year old ADD man in his neighbourhood. He
is short and “busy” and was just out of jail when I first met him at Ibrahim’s
shop three or four years ago. In the years since Ibrahim has given him several cups
of tea a day, listened to his endless babble and quietly turned his life
around. Irregularly, Ibrahim finds painting work for him and the young man
glories in it… but of a consistent mood and deportment… kind of intense whether
there is anything going on or not. But he has settled down with respect to
fitting into the neighbourhood with a bit of invisibility like the rest of us
in the sense of being on anybody’s “keep your eyes on him” list. Ibrahim has
put hundreds and hundreds of hours into this. And it worked. God bless Ibrahim.

The West Pyramids
nurses were busy today. As Reda and I left the hospital there was a flurry of
activity outside the building and news of a large emergency involving many
deaths along the Ring Road in its course hugging Muriutea Canal as it runs
through the neighbourhood… the skyway that runs above it. Some passenger
vehicle capable of carrying 12 or more and perhaps others were involved, for
there were 12 persons later said to be deceased. It is all licensed equipment
at that level with good tires and springs. And it wasn’t necessarily that
vehicle’s driver at fault. We may never hear. Whatever, the nurses of West
Pyramids certainly had a sad day today.

For pasting
elsewhere

To say precisely
where we live in terms of roads, we are on the southwest quadrant of the
intersection of the Cairo-Alexandria Road, where it starts in its south; and
the Fayum / Upper Egypt Road where it starts in its north. The Alexandria road
heads west and soon north. The Fayum Road heads south and the first right goes
up to hill to our place, as does the second, and first main road to the right
goes into Sixth of October City. A great circle of a road takes traffic from
them Pyramids Street where it begins at the Pyramids, and Faisal Street about 120
degrees farther east then north on the great circle. The Pyramids are across
Fayum Road from us. The New Egyptian Museum is being built some few hundred
metres off to the right of our buildings up the hill here by the boy’s high
school at the top.

The state government had given Lutheran (Christian) Social
Services the contract to close all the orphanages... all the group homes for
children with no mother and father.

And he found homes for all those children.

The were hundreds of such children even in our small state.

So when you speak of getting a child from the orphanages...

Our father was involved in such work 50 years ago.

And it seems to me a good thing to do.

And I worked in recreation programs in the late 1960s...

And learned that you can turn bad boys to good very easily
if they are less than 12 years old.

After that they are very hard to change and often end up
involved in crime.

So these are the things I think about when you talk about a
child from one of the orphanages.

But now that the orphanages are closed, decades of
experience in church and state foster homes shows that the children who are
raised in such care don’t fare much better as adults than children raised in
orphanages and reform schools. I forget what exactly I read on the matter
recently, but it was something to that effect.

In about 1980 - The Sirens of Titan

When I was wandering around Guam in about 1980 I heard a
sound I had never heard before. It seemed an atmospheric sound. A deep
“Wuu-wuu-wuu-wuu…” One “Wuu” every second or two. It was so mysterious and I
was drawn to the sound as if the spirits of the island would allow me no other
direction of travel. The direction from which it came was the sea and there was
no mechanical object in the sea that would make such a sound. Mystified, I kept
walking towards the sound and it seemed it was coming from the Two Lovers Point
area. The place from which the Chamorro Romeo and Juliet embraced, tied their
hair together and lept to their death. A small, dispersed cluster of people
were standing off to the right of where this Internet picture was taken looking
down to the sea. Motionless. Speechless. None of them conversing. Just an
occasional hushed word or two it seemed. The area to the right of this picture
is said to be 368 feet above sea level and I walked over and joined them.

The most astonishing thing was then before me. From the sea’s
surface two upside down tornadoes extended upwards towards something like 400
or 500 feet. They were stationary but rotating cones, large at their base in
the sea and diminishing to nothing at the height I just mentioned. They seemed
alive, a bit of swirling of the hips and shoulders… as if they were dancing.
They were part of a larger area in which we were standing where the air was
saturated with moisture. I had no camera and it didn’t seem the time or place
to be asking the people who did if they might get me a copy when they had them
printed. But they were like me. In awe of being present at one of the great
wonders of the earth and I didn’t notice anyone taking pictures. My main
thoughts were eventually about the possibility of the two cones getting bigger
and coming my way so I didn’t linger long but was enraptured while I lingered.

I never mentioned it to anyone in the 35 years or so since
except my sister Sonja recently. She seemed glad for me having told the story
so now I’m telling it to you. But not without some research first. I had walked
away from that place at that time thinking, “My God, the Sirens of Titan can be
seen as well as heard.” But that was a combination of having 1) seen the Kirk Douglas
Ulysses movie (1962) where the hero has
himself tied to the mast of his ship because he wanted to hear the Sirenes singing.
The lore of those Greek islands was that there lived on that island Sirenes
whose song would enrapture and drive one mad. Ships’ crews plugged their ears
when passing it on ships so as not to meet their death, and 2) I had developed
the misperception that they were called the Sirens
of Titan as the author of a popular book by that name had just left the
University of Iowa Writers Workshop after a two year fellowship. His book by
that name was still on everybody’s lips the following academic year when I
first arrived to the campus. I didn’t read it myself. I didn’t read anything I
didn’t have to until I was about 35 and my astigmatism was first diagnosed.
Long hours of reading had always given me something like a migraine through a
BA and two MAs prior to getting my first set of glasses in that year.

So on I went. Never telling the story because it was too
fantastic and kind of a private memory. A few days ago I was wondering how to
tell the story if ever I began to tell the story generally and got on the
internet. It turns out that “waterspouts” are observed with some frequency and
that they do arise from the sea. But I couldn’t find any pictures with two of
them together, any of them that didn’t rise into the sky or any of them where
the base was wider than the top which was just the tip of a cone. They were the
greatest natural wonder I have even seen.

9/11 2015

5am plus. I just got back from Prague a day late. Had some
upbeat story on the tip of my tongue… what was it???Then the date gave me pause as I began to
give this episode a name.

Yes… now I remember. The last man doing all the checks at
customs and immigration. I walked up to him and said, “I have lived here seven
or eight years. Omuha mirauti min El Meenya [My wife’s mother is from El
Minya.] Abuha mirauti min Skandrea [My wife’s father is from Alexandria].

“You are welcome,” he said, looking at me closely for the
slightest moment.

[1]
Although I looked into it more closely at a later date and there are some
places in the Delta and edge of the Sinai where they have more water than they
can use. It varies by local geography and historical (and prehistorical) canal
construction, etc.

Today’s notes concern a strapping young steer who had an
unfortunate experience. He got eaten.

My neighbor’s middle son at the flat I own, Ahmed Magdy Selim, is kind of a
self-made man who I have mentioned before and there are perhaps some hundreds
of thousands like him in Pyramids. This young bloke went to government schools
and then did accounting at Cairo University, working part time as a house
painter, and has just now, at the age of about 26 or 27, been promoted to chief
or other upper level supervisor of reservation personnel or something like that
after only three years at the Intercontinental Semiramis mega hotel on the Nile
downtown. He, at least, seems on his way to being a little bit rich.

When he finished a Berlitz intensive business English course after his accounting
BA and military service four years ago, I took him on a bit of a hike to meet
Assim. We found him at the used furniture store he, at the time, owned and
operated evenings close to his home in Faisal. Assim talked to Ahmed quietly
and a bit privately and the few words spoken that I understood suggested that
Assim was asking about Ahmed’s education. After some further lounging in front
of a cup of tea at the furniture store, Ahmed and I started out on the long
walk back to Tersa/Omda (the nearest well-known cross-street on Tersa).

“He hired me,” Ahmed gasped as soon as we were out of
earshot from the furniture store. “He hired me to help with the
bookkeeping and the evening shift.”

So that was that. I went back to Australia a few short days
later and received nothing but reports of love and admiration in Assim’s emails
about Ahmed and Ahmed’s emails about Assim for the two years I was back in Australia.
And it was the two of them together who picked me up at the airport almost
exactly two years later when I came back for good.

It’s fun to watch over time as I hang around and do a little
work at the hotel... Assim’s kind of well-known for training and then launching
young people on to bigger things. A great mentor, we would say in English. A
bit of a sheikh to the young people who received their start in life from him.

By the time I left to go back to Australia in 2006 I was content with the flat
I had bought and content that I would work, live and die with my friends in
those neighborhoods when I retired from full-time employment in linguistics in
2008. I’d never really dropped my anchor before.

I decided by about 2007 back in Australia that I would also die praying with
them and told Assim and Ahmed in phone calls that I wanted to go to mosque and
declare my faith upon getting back to Egypt.

They wasted no time when I returned, April 2008, and the first day I was first
looking well rested after returning they explained that Assim would take me to
a particular sheikh/pastor and that another man would be there as well.

It was the sheikh from that first night at mosque, Sheikh Asfor (“Sparrow”),
who came to my sister-in-law Zuba’s house two or three evenings ago... two or
perhaps three days after she “sacrificed” a cow in honor of my marriage to Reda
eight months ago.

I’ve been a great disappointment to Sheikh Asfor as I will mention presently.

As Assim now tells the story, Zuba told Assim, after he had
introduced Reda and myself to each other, “I’m gonna kill a cow if she marries
this guy (“sacrifice” – no precise English equivalent of an Arabic word that
seems to imply either “kill” or “sacrifice” [“sacrifice” animals as in the Old
Testament – they actually then consumed the animals as Jewish and Muslim people
do today]). I promise to God I will kill a cow.” Assim was glad to let the
comment be forgotten for a time but he has recently begun to tell me that story
saying that he has been recalling it more and more to Zuba… “You can’t promise
to God to do that and then not do it…”[here]

So the cow story started some days ago with a two or three km motorcycle ride
from Reda’s sister’s house up to where the farms start in northwest Pyramids/Faisal
directly west of Dokki (and then extend north and beyond 26 July Corridor and then
into the Delta). Not far at all from Reda and Zuba’s building – there are vast
agricultural lands there still being cultivated. The city now surrounds that huge
part of the Nile’s west bank farms, which is on the Nile flood plain. The east
bank, Cairo proper, has a bit of elevation and was the earlier city in its
entirety. As mentioned before, the west bank flood plain only became available
for residential use after the Aswan Dam was finished and that area quit
flooding every spring.

At the southwestern edge of that remaining farm land, Reda paid for the cow
under the date palms with money Zuba had given her and then we slowly putt-putt-putted
back to Zuba’s place, one of the Upper Egypt kind of guys who sold us the cow
walking along behind us in his galabea, leading the cow, followed by another
motorcycle putt-putt-putting along with two butchers in galabea on it bringing
up the rear. The “cow” was a two year old steer which looked very clean and
healthy. They slaughtered it in their apartment building’s entrance/foyer
because there was a drain on the floor for the blood.

When I got back some hours later, Reda and Zuba were finished with the
butchering which they had done in an apartment in their building they are
renovation after the men slaughtered, skinned, gutted and quartered the cow
downstairs and brought the pieces up to them. They had it all in a big pile of black
plastic bags of perhaps 5-10 kilos next to a gleaming white pile of bones.

Zuba gave me perhaps 10 kilos to take to “my” family (Ahmed Magdy’s parents,
specifically). Reda and Zuba then distributed much of the rest around Zuba’s neighborhood
over the next day or two, the biggest bags to the poorest families, and Reda
and I brought armloads, perhaps 25 kilos, home for ourselves which went into
the freezer with perhaps 3 kilos for our building’s doorman.

Sheikh Asfor came to Zuba’s place a few nights ago to do what imam’s do when
someone sacrifices a cow. I went to his mosque many Fridays immediately after
my conversion. But that soon came into competition with an equally conservative
mosque very near my little flat where I was living (while Sheikh Asfor’s mosque
was more like a 4 or 5 km hike through the streets of our neighborhoods).

A mosque near my flat took an interest in me once they noticed I was wandering
off for the noon prayers in galabea every Friday at about 11 am. I was visited
at home by three men, one of them a locally famous sheikh who has spent most of
the last 20 years in Los Angeles with a growing mega-mosque. Actually someone
came up from Magdy’s flat who said there were some men at Magdy’s house who
would like to talk to me – and I went down to see what it was all about). Sheikh
Mahdy speaks an unaccented American English and told me in a friendly,
welcoming way that the men with him would help me get started in reading the
Koran at a nearby mosque.

So it was Sheikh Mahdy at my brother Magdy’s house. Surely I
will think of tongue twister with which to tell future versions of the story.

Sheikh Mahdy’s invitation soon became rather more appealing than Sheikh Asfor’s
mosque because that small mosque – very small mosque – which Sheikh Mahdy
directed me to is very close to my house – very close – and doesn’t pray Gomah
(“1. the Friday midday prayer; 2. Friday”). Like many of the small mosques on
our streets over around Tersa/Omda, everybody goes to a certain large mosque on
the main street, Tersa, for Gomah. There the “Dr.” imam speaks rather softly
for about 20 or 30 minutes while Sheikh Asfor always speaks for an hour and a
bit… in a great bellowing voice over a loud PA system... to a good-sized
gathering I might add. Very popular with Upper Egypt migrants. Of course I
never understood anything of what either one of them was saying in their
sermons so I was glad for a shorter walk to a shorter talk. I wore galabea to
the Tersa Street mosque for a while. But it didn’t seem to be the most common
thing to do so I then usually didn’t unless I was just feeling kind of happy
and wanted to go to mosque as Muslims did 1,000 years ago and more, wearing
galabea and sandals, my eyeglasses and wristwatch left at home and nothing in
my pockets but my house key and prayer beads.

By the end of a year and a month back in Egypt, almost precisely, I got my first
flat with Reda in Dobat. Here I go to a large mosque on the other side of the
school from our flat. People at that mosque are pleasantly oblivious to me, as
they were at the big mosque on Tersa Street, except that one or two people a
month may walk up when they notice me somewhere in the neighborhood, and
introduce themselves, saying they’ve seen me at mosque, and welcoming me since
I seem to be new. They don’t necessarily assume that I am a foreigner. They just
occasionally and pleasantly welcome anyone new to a mosque. An Egyptian might
be a white, white Europoid (although very, very few have anything but jet black
hair unless they are Syrian) or a black, black African.

I had learned by the time we married and moved out here that neither Sheikh
Asfor’s mosque nor the small mosque I was directed to in my old neighborhood by
Sheikh Mahdy are highly regarded by the main of the larger community. And...
surprise, surprise, surprise... certain members of the one small “Sunna” mosque
even made disparaging comments about the other.

There is mild disdain towards those Upper Egypt people who
cling to their rural ways on the part of older Pyramids families and there is
the same resentment towards fundamentalists in general that so many of us have
in America and Australia. Jesus will come back if we help Israel steal more
land from the Palestinians (America and even a bit of that in Australia). The
rich people who don’t want to pay for my ten kids’ education will burn in hell
(Egypt). But it means something to Assim and Tarek to attend Sheikh Asfor’s
mosque so we talk about Islam quite often and I don’t say anything about Sheikh
Asfor’s presumed disappoint with me.

And of course the fundamentalists are delightful when you meet them
individually.

So there we sat the other night, Sheikh Asfor and myself, at
opposite ends of my sister-in-law’s dining table on the day they butchered the
steer, kind of lightly sparing with each other... a glance and a frown on his
part, a glance and a smile on mine. The Keeper of the True Religion and the
Comfortably Less Than Pious.

He had arrived with 5 other men on three motorcycles, the youngest about 20,
the oldest about his age... 40 or so.

I had declined an offer, from the youngest, of a miswaak (sticks the size of a
toothbrush, the blunt ends of which they use to ritually clean the teeth). He
kept trying to give it to me after prayers at Reda’s mosque (the one she and
her sister built into the first floor of their apartment house). I just didn’t
want it and I especially didn’t want him to think I was interested in all their
many overt acts of piety. Prayers were done, we were still kneeling where we
had prayed and I refused it three times and then got up and moved to another
part of the mosque when he poked it at me a fourth time. The Palestinians are
not going to get their state etc. if I use miswaak. Which is, essentially, what
fundamentalists of this type believe. Like Jerry Falwell, who came flying out
the door September 11 and blamed the attacks on American homosexuals and
others, Egyptians became more religiously conservative after the 1967 war
because they believe God would not have let Israel win if they, the Egyptians,
had been living right. Women, for instance, started wearing head scarves again…
and still do.

So afterwards we were sitting at the dinner table, Sheikh Asfor “harumphff-ing”
slightly whenever our eyes met, the 40-ish guy with the biggest zabibah (see Wikipedia) glowering
at me again and again until my amused smiles made him give up, the young bloke
a bit upset until he saw by my constant smiles that I wasn’t mad at him.
Neither Asfor nor any of the others tried to converse with me as they speak no
English that I know of and perhaps assumed that since I wasn’t taking an
interest in the True Religion I also was not learning any Arabic. Or maybe I’m
on their “to be shunned list”, though I don’t know. They’re generally friendly
towards us in the neighborhoods when Reda and I are out and about. Anyway, I
kept my peace and just kind of enjoyed the situation and did not, at Sheikh
Asfor’s table, try to converse.

I don’t remember anything else of consequence from that night except that after
the meal Asfor had each of the other five go into all the rooms of the house
and then, as if at the mosques around the neighborhoods, sing out the call to
prayer, the Adhan, loudly at slightly different starting moments. They were all
experienced muezzin, their calls filled the house and it was really quite
thunderous and pleasant to all of us to hear.

Assim, Reda’s nephew Mahmoud and I then walked the six of them down the five flights
of stairs to the three meter wide street and they climbed onto their three
motorcycles (in their galabeas). I had been saying “Shokrun” again and again as
we went down the stairs and then poured out onto the street. Then as they
started to pull away I called out good and loud, over the rather quiet
motorcycle noises, “Shokrun tani! Miraati mabsuuta awi!” (“Thank you again! My
wife is very happy!”). They exploded in embarrassed laughter. I don’t know why.
Perhaps they then assumed I had understood everything they had been saying
through the evening.

So that’s the report from Pyramids of a Saturday evening. I only found out a
week or ten days ago that the spacious, gardened clubs of the rich keep lists
of people offering native speakers’ English tutorials and that patrons of those
clubs are used to paying $30 an hour for these services. So tonight I’ll be
getting the names and phone numbers of these places on the Giza side of the
Nile gathered together off the internet and start calling them tomorrow. A
couple I previously knew of already have my details. I have a copyediting
application in limbo with an Arabic language newspaper that is working towards
launching an English edition (which they have already done in Beta ~
provisionally on the internet). The editor in chief says she can’t get the
business office to cut loose with the funds for my position at the moment and I
know independently that they are behind schedule on the launch of their English
hardcopy version whose advertising revenue and the eventual addition of
advertising to the web version being, one would guess, the source of funds for
the copyediting position. But I have a little income from work at Assim’s
hotel... and more if I want it. And my first pension check arrived a few weeks
ago from one of my old trucking companies in America. So we’re some months away
from crisis mode, financially, and Reda’s cheerfully frugal in the meantime.

Actually, there has been only one. And it was an $8 ticket. Which I could have
paid on the spot (and left with my driver’s license). But I didn’t have $8 with
me (flat tires are only $4 for tube replacement and I think I had $5 or some
similarly 27 February 2010 – a moving experience

Whew. We just spent the day moving (from Apt 54 to Apt 44 in
the same building).

We’re done for the night and fairly well brain dead. The apartments are
identical so by the time we got about half done I kept having trouble
remembering if I was supposed to be taking stuff out or bringing more stuff in
as I wandered back and forth with armloads of things. Kept going downstairs
instead of upstairs when leaving 44 as well (one can only go down from 54 and I
was walking out of 44 on autopilot or something). Lots of small differences,
mostly negative. This flat only has one electrical outlet per room except for
the kitchen. No fly screens in this one, either, so we’ll have to do something
about that. The main breeze comes from the French doors and it isn’t easy to
add fly screens to them if they weren’t built that way in the first place. I
don’t quite know what we will do.

It didn’t rain at all the first year I was back but we had a real hot week from
about ten days ago and then it turned cold again and it rained and hailed and
the wind blew like crazy last night. And we’ve had rain several days already
this winter. And me... the motorcyclist. It didn’t rain once last year and only
two or three times the year before.

The English language newspapers that wanted to hire me couldn’t get their
financial offices to cut loose with a budget to do so but then someone helped
me look into tutoring intermediate school students and also adult business
conversation people.

By two or three weeks ago I found I was having trouble getting on English
tutoring lists at some of the “shooting clubs” and expensive “international”
(rich people) English schools because I don’t have a Teaching English as a
Second Language certificate. I found out I could do a correspondence course for
$200 or $300 but wasn’t that keen to be teaching or tutoring as I have very
little teaching experience and no tutoring experience at all.

So I let my fingers do the walking and found out there are 36, I think,
translation services in the Yellow Pages for greater Cairo. Not wanting to blow
all my leads at once I emailed five with a resume/brief about the kind of work
I was looking for – seeking to do “A native English speaker’s final light
editing”. They all gave me work and one of them has me all day, every day. I’m
condensing Charles Dickens novels to an upper intermediate, early high school
English as a second language level (when there is nothing else to do). And it
is also the closest translation service to home so that’s been a great bonus.

And then, thanks to Google, the Dutch embassy found my home page (which doesn’t
say “Israel Stinks” anymore) and they are now preparing a contract for me to do
about 10 hours of work at $38 an hour... their suggestion of a reasonable
price, not mine. So, all up, it looks like we’ll have a car and be saving for a
house (apt.) by the end of summer or so. I’ve only had two employers, really,
in the last 20 years, Linguistics – RSPAS – ANU and an Omaha trucking company,
so I’m not used to seeking work. I didn’t know where to start but it all came
good.

We took a two year lease on our new place upon Reda expressing her desire to do
so. She wants to spend 15 April 2011, the day she mandatorily retires, until
about two years from now looking for a place to buy. We’re happy in the burbs
for the moment but we miss the barrios where everything is just out the door
and life on the street is so invigorating. No idea what we’ll do. The newer developments
and even the 20 or 40 year old development we live in aren’t half full and even
when they do eventually fill up, they just don’t have the density for the neighborhood
markets and street life we both miss out here.

I starting writing these notes a few nights after I met Reda
10 months ago saying, retrospectively in a preface I added at a later date:

“Within 30 years, Delta and Upper Egypt migrants and their descendants will
account for some large portion of Cairo’s peoples, a status they hold even
today. But in 30 years they will be Cairo’s pre-eminent constituency.”

Learning more since about the demographics – 20 million live in Cairo, 20
million live in Upper Egypt and, my goodness, 40 million live in the Delta....
over half of Cairo’s 15% annual population growth is due to young singles and
families arriving from Upper Egypt and the Delta. I am told, literally, there
is no more water in the Nile to further expand farming in either place.[1]
Family size is down but youth unemployment is high because of much higher birth
rates 18 years ago and more. Not all these young people arriving to Cairo are
literate. There is often a ground floor room or couple rooms designed into
buildings where the doorman lives with his family... commonly illiterate Upper
Egypt men in their 30s and their wife and children. But their children do go to
school and so onward the generations march through time.

I thought for some months that both Reda’s parents were both from El Minya in
Upper Egypt but Reda’s father turns out to have been from Alexandria. So she’s
immediately related to people from the emerging constituencies of both Upper
Egypt and the Delta as well. And typical of how they intermarry in Cairo...
with each other or anyone else they feel leads an upright life. It’s twice the
fun for us. We’ve been to the farm in El Minya and will soon be in Alexandria
again where her cousins’ children are mostly in their 20s and have moderate
numbers of children to bounce on our knees.

A Reda story that I thought I’d tell tonight is about the night she lost
something off a toktok (tricycle motorcycle taxi - Latin
orthography “toktok” sounding more like “tuktuk” sometimes because there is no
difference in Arabic) after we were married but before she started riding
on the back of my motorcycle.

We were on our way home from visiting her sister and she had
armloads of plastic bags full of fruit and vegetables. We walked, me pushing
the bike, to the thoroughfare where she got on a tuktuk with all this stuff and
I got on the bike and followed along. About a kilometer away from her sister’s
place one of her plastic bags about the size of a deflated basketball fell out
of the tuktuk and I stopped and picked it up. It was wet and slimy and smelt
like the alcoholic who died in my apartment house in Copenhagen over one
Christmas. He had the heat turned up in the flat and his body wasn’t found for
a week or two. Another bag kind of flopped off the tuktuk and onto the street’s
sand and dust about 100 meters later and I shook my head and drove on. She was
dumping her sister’s kitchen rubbish.

What happens to it in that particular place, and through
much of Pyramids, is that Bedouin shepherds bring their sheep and goats through
the next day and all the organic stuff is removed as the herds forage through
the bags people have pitched since the herd was last there. Then self-employed
trash collectors come through looking, by individual specialization, for
cardboard or plastic bottles or empty tins. There are perhaps dozens of specialties.
Some just drive about on the carts calling out, “Bikiya” (second hand) and
dismantle things for parts or other recycling. They start very young when their
parents take them out of school to help. They know no other life or work and are,
perhaps, mostly illiterate. In this and other ways, over 80% of Cairo’s trash
is recycled... a testament to the government’s effective fostering of informal
solutions to things they don’t have a budget for and, also, a different kind of
testament to using a soft hand with urban or rural poor people who take their
children out of school to work. On the matter of Reda’s missiles onto the curb,
nothing is left but tens of millions of, mostly white and shredded, empty
plastic bags blowing through the neighborhoods like snow in a northern winter,
invisible to the eye of the residential beholder.

I was up to a friend’s place on the 10th floor of
one of the area’s grand new apartment buildings, standing on the balcony
smoking a cigarette, and called to my friend, saying that “a very wealthy man
is walking down the street.” He came to look and I pointed to the man leading a
flock of sheep down on the street. He laughed merrily and said, “Those sheep
belong to the man with the new car business” (around the corner). I had assumed
all were Bedouin doing well in the city.

We got moved into our new flat some days ago. Then just as we were sitting
around huffing and puffing from our exertions of the day, the old landlord
telephoned and asked us if we’d like to move back in to his flat again. His son
is still getting married but is being posted overseas so the flat isn’t
presently needed by his family after all. I don’t have time to move again due
to favorable volumes of business coming in for my native English speaker copy
editing work. Reda will moan for three months, her cousin Assim predicts,
because the rent in our new place is about $30 higher. But for a dollar a
day... I ain’t gonna move again. But I’ve designed the fly screens for our new
flat, which has none, and am going to buy the tools and put them in myself.
Reda’s endlessly intrigued that both my grandmothers grew up on farms and
attributes anything I can make or fix to those good influences.

“Badaghaz” (bottled and piped natural gas or perhaps, I am now wondering, the
name of the stove itself) hookup came 10 days or two weeks after we moved into
the new flat. So now Reda is again cooking the last of the cow parts she froze…
which I can no longer identify. But that’s a story previously told.

A week ago made right about fifteen months since I gave my carpenter LE4000
($800) towards an LE6000 project to do a major office desk and bookshelves
project for my own little flat that I then moved out of when Reda and I got
married and moved into another, and now another, place. The following is pasted
from a letter I drafted to the tourist police telling the story.

---------------
Submission to the Egyptian Tourist Police

Pyramids Monument Station

Pyramids, Giza Governate

by Jeffrey C. Marck

Egyptian Drivers License Number: 02070000472631

Australian Passport Number: M9223627

53 Abdullah El Bahar Street (via Omda)

Pyramids, Giza Governate

and

Apartment 44, Building 38

El Remaya City

Pyramids, Giza Governate

Sometime between the end of February and the end of March, 2009, I deposited
LE4000 with Mr. Ashraf for the construction of a large desk and office set for
my home on Abdullah El Bahar Street. The total cost was to be LE6000 and LE2000
would be due upon completion of the work.

But in April 2009 I was introduced to a woman, we decided to get married and
were married in May, moving into Building 38, El Remaya City.

The LE6000 project was to be custom built for a particular room in my Abdullah
El Bahar Street home. I went to Mr. Ashraf upon moving to El Remaya City.
Actually he was present when we signed the lease. I informed him that the
LE6000 project was too big for our new home. I then asked him to build a
smaller project. I asked if he could build it to about the same size as a LE3000
project he had done for me in about three months’ time the year before. With
him in the new house we measured the place the desk would go.

He had done nothing to start the LE6000 project so this was no inconvenience to
him. We agreed that he would build the LE3000 project and that he could keep
the other LE1000.

There was never any receipt from Mr. Ashraf nor any contract. There had been
none for the project the year before. But a mutual friend, Assim El Sersy, was
witness to conversations surrounding the two projects as they developed. He
witnessed these conversations at Mr. Ashraf’s shop, at my home, at Mr. Assim’s
hotel and other places we met. Mr. Ashraf came to my wedding. There were
various places we met and Mr. Assim talked with Mr. Ashraf and myself about the
nature of our agreements. I think we can expect that Mr. Assim will provide
evidence if Mr. Ashraf wishes to complain that I have said something untrue.

There is now a big problem. Mr. Ashraf did not start the project for about a
year. Various pieces of the project have now simply been lying around his shop
for several months, are becoming damaged and have never been completed. And now
Mr. Ashraf, and Mr. Assim saw Mr. Ashraf do this, has begun asking for an
additional LE1000 to complete the project.

---------------

I had the letter translated by Mr. Ibrahim who owns the translation service
I’ve been working with for some months now. He printed it on his company’s four
color letterhead, stamping the translation as certified with two different
kinds of stamps at the bottom. This was about ten days ago on a Thursday.

The translation service is two turns down side streets from a major U-turn
junction on Faisal Street and the carpenter’s shop is two turns down side
streets on the other side of the U. We generally wander away from the office at
about 4:15 pm (mine is thus a seven hour day which begins at about 9:15 am as I
wait until 9 am to leave our house, the traffic being quite wretched up to 9
and quite lovely immediately afterwards).

So upon leaving the office just after 4 pm a week ago last Thursday, I folded
the letter into thirds, put it in a nice envelope, put the envelope in my shirt
pocket and motorcycled to the U-turn in the median and across, going the wrong
way down the last 40 metres of Faisal Street, as cyclists do, and turned onto
the first side street. I didn’t have to turn down the second because Ashraf,
the carpenter, was at the falafel shop right where his shop’s side street
intersects with the main side street. He tried a bit of hail fellow, well met,
but I was immediately occupied with getting the bike turned around and pointed
back at Faisal Street, gave it a shot of gas, lurching towards him, slammed on
the brakes as I came up to him, pulled the letter out of my pocket, handed it
to him with a snarl, and blasted off, showering him with gravel from my
spinning rear tire.

He had been served.

This was 4:20 pm.

At 5:20 pm I was at home and there came a call from “General” somebody at
Ashraf’s shop.

“Aii-iiy-wa (Ye-e-ess)?” I said, unruffled. We rent our home from a general.
Our last landlord was a general. Our apartment building is full of generals.
The building super is a retired general. If Ashraf wanted me to talk to a
general, I guess I could get a few generals to talk to him. But better save
them for another day.

The general on the phone could apparently think of nothing
more to say and Assim, my old, old friend who owns the hotel and married me off
to his cousin Reda, came on the line and said, “Ashraf is saying to pick up
everything on Sunday.” I thanked him and Reda called Ashraf for me on that
Sunday to sus it out. It would be ready, “tomorrow” and “tomorrow” was the word
again the next day, Reda gaily conversing with him a bit extraneously each day
to sustain the fiction that it was a friendly phone call.

On Wednesday I drove by his place after work, passing the
shop and ignoring Ashraf’s beckoning me to stop and talk, making a U-turn about
20 meters down the street. The pieces of my desk and book shelves were all
completed and sitting against the buildings on both sides of the road. Probably
he didn’t have the money to send it all to the paint shop for lacquering or
whatever it is he usually does, and I called out to him as I drove back past
his shop that I would return after 10 pm with a truck.

Reda and I motorcycled back to that neighborhood at about 10 pm and started
looking for a truck. It’s the city that never sleeps. Trucks for hire
congregate at nearby bridge over the Mariotea canal nearby. Some were too big
for Ashraf’s side street, some were too small for the load, some were too
expensive, some drivers looked just a little bit crazy and on we went, Reda
bargaining at last for one that had a driver and an extra man.

When the deal was made there was then a long conversation about how to get to
the shop, when finally the men said, “Oh, Ashraf. We’ll see you there.”

Reda and I took some wrong way street shortcuts on the motorcycle to Ashraf’s
while the men made a legal trip with the truck, all of us arriving at the same
moment, as it turned out. It was all sweetness and light, we got the stuff
loaded, down the road and up the hill to our house, up four flights of stairs,
into the guest room/office and off to bed before midnight. I’ll stain and
varnish it myself, who knows when?

I’ve worked over 1000 hours, 1500 perhaps, at home with boxes stacked on each
other for a desk since giving Ashraf the LE4000 15 months ago. I didn’t really
want to go on for another 15 months checking twice a week to see if it was all
inching along or something.

The power of the press. Perhaps I shall write more letters
to the Pyramids Monument Tourist Police Station in the future... that I never
deliver to them. It was a sufficient threat this time around.

Well, my monthly charges at the bank went through yesterday without overdrawing
anything and I thought I’d give pen to certain... interested parties.

Yesterday also firmed up some new arrangements with a new customer for ATS
translation where I work. It is a customer I found. He had Googled for “native
English speaker copy editing Cairo” about six months ago, lining up his ducks
for services he would be needing as he prepared to crash into forming an Africa
infrastructure news service (for international construction companies,
technology companies, etc. wanting to know about government tenders around
Africa).

As it does today, or even Googling just “copy editing Cairo”, my website came
straight to the top six months ago. And also, “native English copy editing”,
for which I continue to be number one in the world. I’d be a little bit rich if
I could tell people how I did it but I don’t actually know why it is tops in the whole world. Anyway, it only
brings in about four or five large assignments a year.

Quite unexpectedly, I loved my Peoples of the Pacific Islands elective and
Introduction to Archaeology courses in about 1973. Between the two the whole
direction of my studies changed entirely. I struggled with the idea of leaving
African economic studies... leaving that “investment” behind... but it was a
particular repressed insight on a particular day at a particular hour at a
particular moment that burst out of my subconscious and calmly said, “The
Pacific is full of wonderful small peoples with wonderful small problems, with
a romantic prehistory and... besides... the population of Africa is going to
double twice by the end of the century and the economies will not.” It was
those precise words. I will never forget them.

I finally faced it. I simply didn’t want to watch those
unhappy African stories unfold for the next 40 years. And suddenly I was free.
I was gone. That’s the last moment that there was any inner conflict and
suddenly I was in graduate school studying language in prehistory in the
Pacific Islands.

I never lived in a huge city where my various lives keep
proving useful as they do presently.

I was on Saipan for some years when it hardly had an economy.

Then I was back in the American Midwest from the mid-1980s just in time for a
long recession.

Then I was in Australia just in time for “the recession Australia had to have”
but insulated from it by a large scholarship and certain university employment
in a different department.

Then I was back in America just in time to watch the neo-con bubble inching
towards the wreckage that would surely come. I saw it before in the Savings and
Loan excesses when they were neo-con deregulated in 1980s and wondered how it
was materially different than the subprime bubble – but the scale this time was
of an entirely different order.

But then there was Australia again and the dreamy grant Andrew Pawley and
Malcolm Ross had... finishing up things I hardly imagined 30 years before that
we would see completed in our lifetimes. It has taken and continues to take me
into a lot of studies on matrilineality... an unexpected result because few
MalayoPolynesian societies in the Pacific are still matrilineal... but they
were as they migrated into the area 3500 years ago (Hage 1998, Hage and Marck
2003, Marck 2008). Similar results for Bantu and other Niger-Congo speaking
prehistories in Africa: matrilineal migrants. I’m looking to get to Brussels
again and the Africa library there in the coming years.

Anyway, I was able to watch the neo-con wars, the neo-con economic implosion
and the neo-con oil spill from afar.

I’m in this vibrant economy – six percent annual growth again this year – that seems
set to give me the kind of retirement I imagined when I bought my little flat
here in 2005. Really hard work this year, but more like picking and choosing
next year, and more so the next, and the next...

People work hard here and life gets better, at least a little bit, for most
people most years and seems set to go on like that for a while. America was
influential in encouraging the economic liberalization that’s behind it. The
Yank government isn’t always wrong about everything Middle
Eastern. And when it is the Egyptians blame the American government for poor
leadership rather than the American people for poor followership. Still, few
people know I’m also American and I never bring it up in conversation. And it
is always my Australian passport that accompanies me to driver’s license
renewal, etc.

It was a stroke of luck when one of the young people in the neighborhood loaded
a copy of “Australia” (Nicole Kidman in the northern desert) onto my computer
and Reda and I watched it one night. “That’s Australia?” she asked. “Yes,” I
said without qualification. “When can we go?” she wanted to know.

Reda’s had cataract laser removals. Or I guess it’s ultrasound but here they
call it “lazer” in colloquial Egyptian. One about 40 days ago and one about 15
days ago. They turned out just great. The phone company seems to pay for
everything on their health plan. 50% of Egyptians have health insurance
somehow. I’d never have guessed that but now I’ve noticed that figure mentioned
in two reliable sources. And hers continues after retirement, Mr. Ibrahim tells
me.

She came home one day with a purchase order from her health
plan with a lot of medications on it and “cataracts” on one of those lines.
That was the first I heard about her cataracts. I only knew that she kept
rather bright lights on in the hallways at night. She said she’d like me to
take her to the hospital the next day. I assumed it was for a consultation but
it was for the surgery itself and we were there all day, me dozing off in the
waiting room and she getting quite upset about it as had the guys at the
motorcycle mechanic’s place the night before. I had been working 60-70 hour
weeks for a couple months by then and finally… I did it. I dozed off in public.
Twice. And really offended everybody.

Live and learn.

Anyway, she’s been off work all of the last 40 days or something and sleeps a
lot during the day and rattles around the house into the wee hours. So I do,
too. I knocked back to 35 hours a week before starting the English teaching
certificate work 5 or 6 days ago. I’d been running short on sleep for several
months and finally just really wasn’t sleeping at all. So I’m feeling a bit
refreshed these last many days.

Reda and I are both still just terrible about language and it’s still all kind
of pitiful baby talk between us. But there’s a lot of trust and joy and it
doesn’t seem to matter much to either of us. And when it does Google Translator
remains our faithful companion. We get a lot of mileage out of well-planned
jokes and surprises, too.

I come home to find her working on the English CDs for a week or so and then I
get into the Arabic CDs for a while but then she finally says, one day, “I don’t
remember any of this stuff,” and I say, “I don’t either,” and I guess
one just really doesn’t so much anymore at our age. But we find ourselves going
back to the CDs every few months and have another go at it. She has more and
more vocabulary coming back to her from rote memorization in secondary school.
I have the immersion advantage. We both have each other. We’re just kind of
happy and don’t care. And there is progress, however slow.

Mr. Ibrahim (BA English, Grad Dip Linguistics), his wife (BA English Education)
and Reda and I are planning out a book of Cairo Arabic verbs. The most common
ones. Which, as in any language, are the most irregular. It will force me to go
over it again and again and again. And this book of verbs will be designed to
get the user accustomed to the pronouns, prepositions, common juxtapositions of
people, places and things, etc. and not just the verb tenses etc. There isn’t
anything quite like what we’re planning on the shelves of the American
University in Cairo Bookstore and they routinely stock everything on Egyptian
Arabic so they’ll probably stock ours.

I’ve looked for lexicography projects since I got back in 2008 (that I might
volunteer on and similarly force myself into a book, again and again and again
going over the same material, even at the level of data entry and proofing) but
I’ve met most of the “real” (theoretical) linguists in town... there aren’t
many of us and we meet once a month on Saturdays... and no one knows of any dictionary
projects, etc.

Reda and I were up the Nile in El Minya overnight, leaving just after I got
home from work on Thursday.

I didn’t see the kind of activity on the floodplain, as we drove in yesterday
evening, that I saw this morning coming back.

As we drove the Nile floodplain on its main roads coming back late this morning
in the Peugeot 504 station wagon bush taxi with six other passengers and the
driver, I saw some hundreds and hundreds of men by ones and twos on donkey
wagons but mostly by twos on small motorcycles hauling their little
petrol-powered irrigation pumps and sort of nine to eighteen foot, 6 or nine
inch diameter pump hoses to the fields. The taxi driver was just great...
always slightly under the speed limit and taking every kind of sensible
precaution with oncoming traffic, etc. I relaxed and enjoyed the sights.

Some significant portion of water use is unregulated at the level of the
individual farmer. If you have land and there’s a canal running by... you can
pump from it. But of course the canals are thousands of years in the planning
and making and it’s all pretty logical, according to the engineering
assessments, of how to make water available to the whole floodplain...
districts thereof, actually.

What is now regulated is the making of new farms fields, as I understand it.
For millennia and millennia people just expanded the farms and canals as their
families grew. But now, as I’ve mentioned once or twice over the months, there
are at least some areas where the area as a whole is using its quota of water
running into its district’s canals, there can be no more water allocated to the
district, and no one can open up new land (i.e., prepare more floodplain for
irrigation) and one, especially, cannot pump onto land not registered as
irrigation land. But as a practical matter, I suppose they don’t extend the
canals into those areas, anyway. So it’s all pretty simple at that level and
these guys sort of burst out of their residential compounds and onto the roads
all at once as if police in cruisers coming onto the streets from their station
for their day’s shift. It made me wonder if there was a specific time they knew
that the water level of the canals would rise. They live in grander and lesser
villages and settlements and not in the middle of their individual fields like the
Yanks or Aussies... all off at 25 kph on motorcycles (always a second man to
carry the pump and hose) or donkey carts (often, or perhaps usually, with just
one man) to their fields outlying a few healthy kilometers away.

I wondered at the scale of the retail donkey cart business and where they are
manufactured. They have nice, sturdy springs and wheels as on light to
mid-weight family cars. They were all small wagons today that a single donkey
can pull when full. Somewhere they have larger two donkey carts but none were
in use for this morning’s purposes.

I wondered again if our driver would make ample adjustments for this traffic
but I needn’t have. He was once again a dream and assiduously kept his speed
down and gave a wide berth as we progressed through one vast expanse of fields
and its flurry of irrigation equipment transport, through village areas, and
then on through more fields and small equipment on the road.

It’s as flat as south central Manitoba and Minnesota/Northern Iowa. It’s the
height of summer and all the floodplain was green with one thing or another
unless something had just been harvested and was only stubble. There were no
bundles of fodder from these cuttings laying around as one might imagine a neighbor
or perhaps more distant districtman might be glad to liberate anything left
overnight.

I saw grape fields close up for the first time. Or took good notice for the
first time because they were bearing fruit and I finally knew what they were.
They grow the plants in little bushes of about three feet in height and
diameter... no climbing sticks or wires for vines, no nothing that I saw... and
we’ve been having the lovely purple and white fruits for what seems like months
now. I think they were 80 to 110 American cents a kilogram this year, the white
ones less, and the purple ones more, where I didn’t know what they cost last
year... I just never noticed because they were so cheap. They were half the price
and less 5 years ago, I remember clearly. But now perhaps they are said to have
gone more onto the international markets and doubled in price due to export
competition/pressures.

It’s not currency inflation that’s driving those particular prices up. The
Egyptian pound is steadily, year after, year... right at 5.4-5.7 per American
dollar. Australia’s currency exchange rates fluctuate with the Egyptian pound,
but only when the Australian currency is having its own ups and downs. Over any
appreciable period of time the Aussie dollar comes back to 90 US cents and 5.0
Egyptian pounds.

So, this stuff is kind of rolling through my mind, the grape prices, the end of
farm expansions, and, more personally, the recent increase of cigarette prices
by 40 cents a pack because they finally started taxing them in the past month
or so. They cut back petrol subsidies a bit at the same time, I’m told. A lot
of second hand information and guesses perhaps. I didn’t notice.... driving the
motorcycle and buying whole guinea (pound, LE) amounts of “benzene” so I can
pay and depart instead of waiting for them to come back with change. I just
heard about this but don’t know if I’ll be able to take notice and make sense
of it next time I get fuel. I can never remember what, in a sense, the
unvarying price was before. It was 1.75 guineas a liter for one octane level
but I never noticed if that was the one I always got or not. One price was
always around 1.75 and the others were always some odder number I never
committed to memory. So, previously, it was about 1.25 a gallon, American and
35 cents a litre, Australian... the 1.75 guinea per liter stuff.

The road rose eventually where the floodplain and its farms ended and we rose
not fifty or one hundred feet to a kind of low plateau or former floodplain of
undulating, very low rises. I first, as we came towards the edge, noticed six
very tall, thin smokestacks sticking up out of nowhere over the edge of the
rise where the floodplain ended. I had noticed these for the first time yesterday
evening and wondered what they were. It occurred to me in El Menya that Reda
and I were communicating well enough now that I could ask her what they were
and I did so as they came into view on the way back. First I saw four so I was
trying to get her to focus on the number four and that there were four things I
wanted to know about standing up like fingers on the horizon, holding four
fingers up very straight and still. But by that time there were eight or ten so
we had to have another go. Then, all at the same moment, she realized what I
was asking about and a broad graveyard came into view with five or ten of the
smokestacks seeming to stand in the midst of the graveyard and I made a faint
noise of comprehension, thinking for an instant that they were smokestacks of
crematoriums, smoke belching out of every third or fourth stack of a Friday
morning. But then the small size of the surrounding population occurred to me,
dozens more of these smokestacks were appearing to the right and to the left.
And I then realized that I had never heard of Muslims cremating, and I was
uttering a little noise of deflation and misunderstanding just in time to
rescue myself from the opinion of the other occupants of the taxi. My little
noise started just an instant before their little groans over my initial
misperception. No. Muslims never cremate, I was told, eventually, after asking
Assim when we got back home.

They turned out to be the smoke stacks of brick kilns which I saw as our aspect
rose a moment later and then there was some further elevation that exposed kilometers
and kilometers of them right at the edge of dry side up from the floodplain,
desert edge, Reda gaily noting that I figured out what they were, with some
helpful pointing on her part. There they obviously had the best of both worlds.
A clay kind of substance to mine from the surfaces of the low hills and valleys
right at the edge of the floodplain’s high water table. I didn’t see any
surface water pipes at all and wondered if they mustn’t simply drill shallow
wells down to the porous soil of the water table.

I wondered what hundreds and hundreds of trucks it might take to haul all their
industry to Cairo, just as we had seen hundreds and hundreds of “big trucks”
(semis/lorries) waiting to be loaded with fruit and vegetables along the larger
canals where there are always substantial paved roads. I’d not seen anything
like those hundreds of trucks out in the fields since trucking, myself, into
and out of the American West Coast and Southwest desert “truck farms”.

Then came a beautiful sight. “Cairo” was only “140 km” away and our home was
about 15 km before Tahrir Square in Cairo proper, to which the signs always
refer. The drive was now through the desert where it is cheaper and more
convenient to build a superhighway and there would be only a few tiny villages
and too many, really, sparkling but empty modern petrol stations. We were
dropped off with the Pyramids to our right and our home up the hill on the left
and walked home. Which was a great deal easier than catching these taxis and
nice passenger vans to El Menya. They’re always full by the time they get to
our part of town. They muster 15 km deeper into the city so when we left
yesterday we first had to city-bus 15 km in the wrong direction.

We had been talking about going to El Menya for a couple weeks because this
week was the first anniversary of Reda and Zuba’s sister’s daughter’s death (a 40
year-old) after many years of battling Hepatitis C. Even in Australia, that
battle is rarely won. Or such was recently so.

But then there could be no further delay, because, tragedies of tragedies, the
very woman’s 45 year-old sister and her husband were killed in a motoring
accident. Almost a year to the very day after the other one had died. We went
to Zuba’s house before we left where she gave us money and other gifts for
their sister whose only two daughters were now dead.

We went straight to El Menya and straight to the sister’s house where I soon
passed out in the bed they made available to us. I hadn’t expected the trip
until the next day and had worked all night on my teaching certificate the
night before. When I woke up this morning it was with the knowledge that Reda
had not come to bed all night and when I went out into the lounge room she, the
dead women’s mother, and her son, Khalid, were right where I had left them 12
hours before. They had talked all night and they all looked just terrible. Reda
was ready to go. She was too disheartened to come up for the funeral the day
before and didn’t tell me until we were suddenly leaving yesterday, why we now had
to go. The rows of funeral chairs were stilled filled by men yesterday evening
when we arrived.

Khalid had told me last night that his sister and her husband had been driving,
the car rolled into an irrigation canal upside down, and they had both died
there. He sadly walked us to the main road this forenoon and took us to one of
the utes/pickup trucks in the settlement’s main street on the other side of the
canal, the ute driving us, and picking up more people along the way, to the
mustering point for the Peugeots and passenger vans to Cairo.

We didn’t talk about family business in the Peugeot but as we walked up the
hill to our home on the Giza Plateau after getting out of the taxi, she
explained that there were four children. Three are in university and will stay
there. The fourth is Mohamed who I met last night at his grandmother’s house.
There it was explained to me that he was the youngest child of the deceased
couple, was still in secondary school, and would now live with the grandmother
(where he will be innocent, obedient, industrious and loved).

Reda had about just enough energy to feed me, tell me those further details of
the situation, and no more. She went to bed and I went off to the mechanic near
my old neighborhood to see about getting my oil changed but he was too busy
until tomorrow. So I went off to find Assim to see about further details of the
deaths and to talk about a few other situations I might clear up with him.

Assim expressed his anger with the dead couple. All their anger. The mother, the
aunts, the surviving brothers. All of them. “They didn’t have to leave us like
that. They should of been more careful. God knows!” What they specifically
believe is that God knows, for all the eons ahead of us, what people there will
be, what, minutely, they will do of their own free will, and what will happen
to them in every detail just as he knows all such things for all the people who
have come before us and those of us alive today. We will have our own successes
and failings, they will, in the main, be of our own free will, but God knows
what they will be and where they will lead us from even before the time we are
born.

Assim was able to tell me a bit more than Khalid did last night. Khalid teaches
French and also speaks wonderful English but I didn’t want to sort of sit there
and grill him about the death of his second sister in a year. Assim had been
talking to Zuba the last two days and the crash was a single vehicle event on a
deserted road. Perhaps veering to avoid a stray cow or something... they
overturned... and slid into the canal upside down. Did they drown or were they
already dead? Why would I ask? Why would he spontaneously say? I didn’t and he
didn’t. I don’t even know if it was day or night.

There were happier things to talk about. I had decided to work with adult
business English conversation students for my $30 an hour when I get my TEFL
certificate in coming weeks (5 or 10 I’d say). People in the industry say this
is a sensible and possible full time aspiration. Mr. Ibrahim at the translation
service has a 12 year old daughter, Nada, who has been coming to the office
twice a week and I have been tutoring her. Practicing my TEFL lessons on her.
And I know enough, generally as a linguist and in the evidence of my self-taught
foster daughter, Iva, that if you can catch kids and work on their hearing
of a new language, the benefits in terms of their pronunciations of the
new language just kind of naturally flow with small amounts of coaching and
exercises. But this natural ability quickly fades from about 13 on up. Except
in Iva, who went off to New York City for some months recently at the age of 30
and came back to Australia talking like a Yank. Yes, Ivancica! I noticed. How rude
of me to mention it now....

So, I’m learning how fast 12 year olds grab on to good instruction, how quickly
they pick up the specific new sounds of the target language, and how quickly
they forget if I don’t have the right kind of exercises to send home with them.
So Assim’s daughter, Maria (Mariam) is also 12 this summer but a bit further
along to begin with and it is now that I want to bring her in on these twice a
week sessions with Nada. Well, she just about died and went to heaven when she
heard this and then there was the question of how to show her where the office
is. I would come at 11 am Tuesday and take her on the motorcycle, or we could
take the bus or we could take a taxi (just the once). Maria said she wanted to
go on the bus. But her mother said, “Take her on the motorcycle. She’s afraid
to do it. Make her do it.” It was all very gay and after Maria and I
exchanged mobile numbers I went home, Reda was still sleeping, and I worked on www.AmericansInCairo.org, a web
site I own, and then turned to this missive at about dawn.

I had told Assim about midnight that I couldn’t teach his older kids... he had
asked about that, too... because I have to specialize and that I’m going to
have the two: adult business conversation and children under 13 who need
tutoring or small group work in hearing and pronouncing English correctly. I
told him, “I have to get serious. I have to be making $20,000 within a year.
Reda retires in a year and gets a lot of free doctors, and operations and
medicine. People say it will still be free after she retires. Is that really
true?” (This all comes with her phone company employment).

“Yes,” he said. “But the Ministers have been telling President Mubarak that
there isn’t enough money. And he told them, ‘We can’t stop doing these
things for the people.’ And the Ministers told him, ‘We can’t go on
doing all these things for the people.”‘

Assim is very grateful that I never want to talk about
domestic politics. And I sincerely don’t want to. I never said “boo” about
Australian domestic politics or foreign affairs until I was a citizen and, in
the same way here in Egypt, I am a grateful guest of this nation as I was in
Australia and even then I never got involved in politics after citizenship
except in the area of Palestinian rights (and Israeli wrongs). But there are
times, such as this night, when I need to know what’s going on and Assim has
the most eloquent way of distilling it into the folk knowledge of the moment
and I always accept it without a word except, “Thank you.”

It’s well past dawn and Reda was up at 7 and left to take a bus to a (free, for
the moment?) doctor’s appointment having to do with persistent colon problems. “I’ll
take you on the bike,” I said. “I don’t understand this colon problem at all. I
want to come along and talk to the doctor.”

“I’ll get the doctor to write you a letter.”

“Hmph,” I said, lying essentially, and secretly glad for the chance to now
sleep all morning. The doctors at the phone company’s clinics don’t like the
husbands coming along. And Reda probably took one look at me and knew I’d fall
asleep there, repeating my previous offences aAs I mentioned some weeks or
months ago, falling asleep at the motorcycle mechanic’s shop one Sunday after a
long weekend of overtime into the wee hours. They’re all still upset.
Though less so every time I see them. Egyptians can get very completely
indignant and do hold on to it a bit. But they are also completely forgiving,
or at least completely forgetting, of all my faux pas so far... given a
little time.

There are reasons to rejoice, these days.

For all of Cairo right down to just about every single person I know.

The price rises and ratcheting down of subsidies comes at a
time when most of Cairo is sharing in Egypt’s 6.5-7.5% growth (and more) for
the last many years and last year and this year as well.

It’s the first time I’ve missed an American or Australian
recession in 40 years.[here]

The US/EU neo-con recession hasn’t caused any hardship here. One of the most
significant effects came most of two years ago when computer components fell in
price by over 2/3. Every teenager in Cairo seems to know how to build a
computer. But this fall in components prices meant that, in Cairo, a new
computer, with completely new parts fell from about $600 to about $120. The
only people who suffered were the internet cafes because by the end of six
months or a year of the new, low prices so many households had computers that
their members were no longer filling up the internet cafes.

Which is huge to families with teenagers in school that need lots of computer
hours to muscle up their skills for the job market. And the major appliance
megastores are all packed from the moment they open to the moment they close – this
is Cairo and, yes, one occasionally exaggerates... but I think that helps paint
the picture. Things are terribly upbeat and I especially take notice of
the closest major appliance store whenever I drive past it and indeed, it is
simply packed with people all the time.

Another measure is what must be tens or hundreds of
thousands of wonderful $500 150cc Chinese motorcycles in Cairo, the rural areas
and small (upper) Nile and Delta cities. Just like mine… these bikes. Mine has
23,000 km on it in 23 and a half months and has cost me $2.10 Yank a day over
those months, an extra 79 cents a day if I were to depreciate the whole thing
in one fell swoop. The modern world, computers and motorcycles, have come to them.
They won’t all have to come to Cairo and Alexandria to find them or earn
the money for such things. They’ve taken a lot of the money the Yanks give them
and have world class farm to market roads, rural electrification and sewerage
systems.

The young people who want to buy my little flat were
thoroughly befuddled and then embarrassed when their “deal” with a bank “for
the first week in June” turned out to be only an offer to look seriously at the
application once the woman achieved the current-job-longevity-requirement in
the first week of June. So the first week of July they finally fessed up and
said they were having problems they didn’t understand.

“No worries!” I said (lit.: “No problem.”). “In Australia we apply to five or
six banks and they all say the same thing. Either they all say, ‘Yes’, or they
all say, ‘No.’ If they all say, ‘Yes,’ then we take their offers to a good
accountant who can read their offers and tell us which one is giving us the
cheapest deal with the least hassles and potential problems.”

“But isn’t that sneaky?” they asked.

“Noooo, it’s like buying a new car. They expect you to. You go to five
different places who have the same new car and see who gives you the lowest
price. It’s just like buying a new car. They expect you to shop
around.”

So every couple of days since then I get a merry call from them at yet another
bank where they are being treated courteously and the loan officers are glad
for the application etc., etc. It’s been such a great lift because I’ve really
been suffering for them, not to mention myself and my creditors. Other
potential buyers are appearing in the wings and the young couple will accept
this as all that can be done at this point in their financial lives if all the
banks decline. I specifically want to sell to them because then the whole
building will be owned by one family again, “my” family, who can parlée it into... well that’s another story.

So now I will leave off by slapping in a few paragraphs that haven’t found a
home in these missives previously. It’s about “residence”. And the subject at the
moment, has, indeed, been residence. Therefore:

“I married Ma’adi. We live in Ma’adi.”

I heard this said in Cairo in 2005. It was a 30ish man replying to the question
of where he and his wife had made their home upon marriage, she being from Ma’adi.

This was some weeks or months after I was looking for a flat to buy and my new
acquaintance, also 30ish man, mentioned that their flat was near his wife’s
parents and that it was part of the neighborhood into which I was buying, if I
was happy with the area he would show me, and the “house”, as flats are called
in Cairo English, that he knew to be for sale. He and his wife of similar age
were expecting their first child and they were happy to think that the young
woman’s mother and two sisters were nearby.

Of course these kinds of stories occur in a wider society where the male
prerogatives, concerning residence, are essentially absolute. A normative kind
of statement that can be made is that the wife, when living with her husband’s
family, seeks to isolate her husband’s resources from his family that surrounds
them, seeking for herself, her children and her parents and extended
family all that she can in the face of constant small pressures from his
family. I guess that same normative statement can be made when they don’t live anywhere
near the husband’s family, but of course when they do it is all amplified.

There are accommodations of various sorts. Two brothers in their mid and late
20s married two sisters in their early and mid 20s and took them to live in the
men’s father’s apartment building. I have watched the young ladies become each
other’s partners in microscopic passive resistance conspiracies and they are
endlessly glad for each other’s company. Some small group of men, perhaps two
or three, was discussing the young men’s circumstances with me one night and
there was a certain question of resource distribution in the air in that
patriarchal homestead.

“Well, what are their wives thinking of all this?” one asked, because it
involved an element of competition between the young men.

“Their wives are sisters,” I said.

“What?” a second asked. Neither he nor the first speaker seemed to expect me to
know of such patterns.

“Their wives are sisters,” I said.

“Well....” they both sighed, much astonished. “Then there’s no problem,” one of
them said, completing the thought both had begun to speak.

Just guessing at the time, whoever won the father’s favor would then be under
pressure from his wife to receive some share, she would divert some of the resulting
resources to her sister, who would present them to her husband, ameliorating
her husband’s hurt at not winning the prize outright. In fact, I wondered if
the father wouldn’t transfer the resources concerned to the son who would play
all this out the most elegantly... which he… eventually… did.

Outright matrilocality – which, for Cairo purposes, I would define as renting
or buying in the bride’s mother’s building or neighborhood (bride’s father’s
building or neighborhood if still alive and still cohabiting with the bride’s
mother) – is common enough that one young engaged couple’s residence was
undecided and the subject of some gossip in an office I visit occasionally. “It’s
a crazy man who makes his wife live somewhere she doesn’t want to,” I said lazily.
As the office was entirely friends of the bride, one of the eldest men looked a
bit ruffled and then said, “Yes, but we can’t say that.”

And my talk was cheap. I have no relatives in Cairo and we would, just
naturally, as we have done, live nearest my wife’s family as do most men who
have migrated here and marry women with local extended families. Convenient to
her place of employment, in our case, but not inconvenient to her family or
even “mine” on short motorcycle hops. Which is similar to another kind of
success story for the bride: the groom marries the girl next door. Then she’s
in heaven. Her mother will be right there.

It’s 1:30 am and Reda just called the landlord, one “General
Sami”, to arrange payment of the rent for tomorrow some time. I was amazed and
mentioned that I don’t call people after 9 pm at all unless it’s someone I know
who turns off their phone when they’re sleeping.

“No one’s asleep this early on a Friday night during Ramadan,” she said, taking
my hand and walking us out to the balcony. There she swept her arm grandly
across the panorama of the immediate neighborhood and indeed the lights of
every lounge room and most of the other rooms were shining where all but two or
three are normally off by this time of night.

“There’s no light in that one,” I said, pointing to the
single flat that wasn’t lit up.

“They’re not home yet,” she said.

Perhaps our memory of Ramadan this year will always return first to a really
wonderful evening Assim had for us at his hotel with his oldest brother, Ahmed,
and his wife – who I had never met before.

Ahmed’s 15 years older than Assim and, technically, it would have been him
watching over the brother-less and divorced (Zuba) and maiden (Reda) female
cousins all these decades in Cairo (their mothers were sisters from El Menya) –
but Ahmed was away those many years with an illustrious career in the Gulf… all
his kids got PhDs, etc. And then there was a sister of Ahmed and Assim at that
big Ramadan meal, a medical doctor, who I wasn’t seated close to and didn’t get
a chance to converse with much. But the star of the evening was Reda because
something amusing had happened at our house that Assim exploited for the
occasion.

It was just a few nights before that Zuba had telephoned. She no longer tries
to boss me around but I occasionally remind her of the days when she did… by
teasing her... which is what slowly made her give up trying to tell me what to
do all the time after Reda and I first got married.

If the home phone rings at 3 am, I know it’s Zuba so when the call came I
thought I’d do what I might do to rile her and picked it up, myself:

“Mish mawguta.” (Reda had arrived to the phone and was watching, amused that I
would mislead Zuba).

“Ley?” cried Zuba. (‘Why?’ – the only answer would be the hospital or something
– Reda’s always either here or at Zuba’s at 3 am).

But the answer was:

“Fii ręęgil tani.” (‘There’s another man.’) Reda’s face lit up in delight and
she started pulling her right hand across her throat as if holding a knife and
cutting her throat.

“Eh?” Zuba said, shocked and mystified.

“Fii ręęgil tani.”

“Eh?” Zuba cried loudly.

Now Reda was just flatly laughing, and reaching out to take the phone. A little
revenge against the sister who had authority over her for decades?

“La’a, aana kizęęb,” (‘No, I was lying.’) I said before Reda got the phone away
from me with her left hand, still making slicing motions across her throat with
her right.

After the phone call Reda picked up right where it had started and told me
quite happily and excitedly that now her family had to cut her throat.

Without knowing it, I had said the magic words. I attempted to convey Reda’s
amusement to Tarek, the great composer, a few days later. But he simply froze
as I said the specific words I had spoken. Suspended animation. I attempted to
continue with the story but, he was so disappointed that I knew those words
that decided I’d best act like I hadn’t spoken them and changed the subject.
There is a particular phrase in Polynesian languages and another in
Micronesian, both ancient we think, going back to the time of Christ and
before, having to do with men sneaking around at night with their girlfriends.
Young men would run from my office, screaming with laughter, to hear them
spoken (and the old and the proper are mortified to discover that a foreigner
knows them – I had seen Tarek’s sort of suspended animation when an Islander or
reacted, crestfallen, to my knowledge of such things in Egypt or the Pacific
Islands).

When I next saw Assim, I mentioned the phone call. He was instantly amused but
attempted a frown, saying:

“You can’t say that!!! Now Zuba has to tell us all!!! And we have to make an
investigation and ask everybody in the family to swear what they know!!!”

He let it go at that and since he was amused rather than concerned I let it go
as well.

But the inquisition did come. It was on the day of the Ramadan feast at his
hotel that I began this story with.

It was in a guest room perhaps 7 meters by 7 meters. The one my sister, Jana,
stayed in, come to think of it.

Tables from the dining room had been brought in for the meal and I had been
seated next to Ahmed, Assim’s (much) older brother, and we had some interesting
chats in English during the course of the meal.

Everybody finished eating and we were spreading around the room a bit. To the
couch along one wall. Pulling our chairs away from the table. Ahmed’s large
wife laying down on the double bed with Assim’s 10 and 12 year old daughters
sitting on the other side of the bed.

Eventually, there was a lull in all the conversations all at once and Assim,
stood up, taking a central position in the room, saying, as he swept his arm
widely around the room until his hand was pointing at me, something like,
“Huuwa olti, ‘Fii ręęgil tani.’” (“He says, ‘There’s another man.’”)

The slouching young girls’ spines went straight as arrows and their eyes went
huge as they looked at Reda and then Ahmed’s wife and then their mother, Hanan,
as the latter two exploded wildly in utter mirth.

Reda was instantly beaming demurely and squirming in her chair like a naughty
school girl caught out about something.

The inquisition was on.

Assim formally and loudly called to the various blood relatives in the room,
one by one, asking if they knew anything about this while I chirped out
again and again that I had been lying and Ahmed and Assim’s wives (and Assim’s
sister, el doctora) laughed on and on, wiping tears from their eyes,
Reda beaming happily and making a motion of a knife slicing across her throat
every time our eyes met, the little girls incredulous and only gradually
understanding the accusation and that it was a joke. They sat through it all,
each with all eight small fingers her mouth, which spread their mouths wide,
their teeth clenching down on their fingertips, their aspect darting from
person to person as Assim, and the others, one by one, spoke.

Goodness. Everybody was so amused… and Assim, surprise, surprise, the
great maestro of those moments, was finally mock mollified and sitting down…
the conversations from before picking up where they left off. A cherished
memory of the day for the family.

Twice since, I think, I’ve been talking on the mobile to Reda, catching up on
where to meet later and there was to be some delay at her end. Both times I said,
with a light inquisitional voice, “Mafish ręęgil tani?” (‘There’s no other man?’).
And twice the reaction of her and the people around me was the same. She
happily protesting that her family would get a knife and cut her throat if
there was anything like that going on. The people around me amused that I would
know that phrase and amused that I would play the jealous husband to my wife
(there were no children present). “Knife.” “Sikkiina.” Finally, perhaps, I
shall finally remember the word.

The next couple of times I stopped at their house, Assim’s
little daughters greeted me with speechlessness, eyes as big as the moon and
smiles as wide as when they had eight fingers in their mouths at the hotel
dinner. I didn’t known it was possible for the mouth to stretch that wide
unassisted.

Otherwise there are these nascent language services accounts from the rich side
of town that my ATS boss once didn’t want me to have on a freelance basis (but
now finds some of them bringing in not just native English speaker copy editing
work but then translation of the completed work into Arabic – which pays him
more than other aspects of the total job pays me). Not a great change in income
but I have to kind of put on the brakes and make sure these new clients are
getting taken care of properly before I go out and look for more. Sometimes two
at once want something done overnight. My rates are low with the understanding
that they will rise to the going rate by about this time next year.

Otherwise, still, I’ve been drafting grant proposals to get some of the Pacific
Island’s most productive breadfruit to tropical Africa (the present Pacific
Island breadfruit in Africa comes from the time of Captain Bligh, his crew’s
mutiny to some extent due to the pregnant girlfriends they had on Tahiti after
six months of carousing while waiting for the right time of the year to prepare
breadfruit cuttings for the West Indies [and transferred to West Africa in the
1840s]). What is now being shipped produces two or three times the Tahitian variety
of tree already there.

The world’s great Breadfruit Institute (in Hawai’i) turned
all their Africa contacts over to me because with the American recession they
have neither the resources to help write grant proposals nor do they know
enough about Africa to be of help in all the necessary areas. So I’ve learned a
lot quickly about the science of breadfruit and have found it fairly easy to
get NGOs in Ghana started on applications as 1) I did an African rural
economies BA and visited Ghana in 1971 and 2) I lived with breadfruit
cultivation for 10 years in the Pacific Islands.

Diane Ragone (rah-goh-neh), the Breadfruit Institute’s founder and director
writes overnight that US-AID might fund African initiatives (we missed, 31
July, the deadline for the Australian grant that would have been most
appropriate as we were just, at the time, first pulling information together).
She’s to go to the mainland and meet with them in DC. And I’m her guy in
Africa.

I don’t think they need my participation on any of the grants’ actual
activities though I help quite a bit with the bona fides of the African
groups. So I’ll just be staying here growing my language services accounts.

Still, quite an honor to be helping the Diane
Ragone... and the African NGOs. I’ll always be the guy who emailed or
telephoned out of the blue... the guy with the magic wand.

Samoa has licensed the genetic material to Diane and Diane has licensed that genetic
material to Global Breadfruit (Cultivaris) and they clone, in layman’s
language, and produce as many tens of thousands of “germs”, I think they call
them, as one wants, and raise them up to 6 inch plants with nice little root
balls. At $10 each, FOB Germany. We’ll probably be speaking of 500-1000 plants
in the Ghana proposal (as much as $50,000 all up – $5000-$10,000 for the
plants, ~$5000 in shipment costs, and then 3-6 months of central nursery care
before they are made available to farmers).

Thousands of islands over thousands year. And rare incidents
in prehistory that one of the crossbreeds resulted in super-producing seedless
varieties. And there are some Micronesian super-producing varieties. The most
bountiful breadfruit in the world. They out-produce the present African
varieties 2 to 1 and 3 to 1. They even out produce Belgium by dryweight when
comparing to grains and Belgium is the largest producer per hectare in the
world. Two varieties are shipped that fruit at complementary times of the year
– good for people who want to eat every day. Good for factories that want
product every day.

Prehistorically, the Samoan varieties concerned were,
perhaps, the source of or a destination for the breadfruit I was around in
Micronesia. I didn’t know there was any breadfruit in the world that
out-produces certain Micronesian varieties. Western Polynesia and Central and
Eastern Micronesia kind of stayed in touch after they were settled two and
three thousand years ago so I assume the best from the one place would sometimes
have made it to the other. I’ll find out over time.

This first grant that the Breadfruit Institute will write a
letter of support for goes to Ghana. It will test my ability to find NGOs that,
in turn, have or find agricultural stations where plant survival is most likely
to be up around 100%, as it was among Global Breadfruit’s first of its kind
shipment in history to Jamaica – where it is the national food and where the
shipment perhaps arrived to some fanfare. The second shipment went to Honduras
and was apparently met with suspicion by agricultural inspection teams at the
airport who delayed the release a number of days and there was significant
plant mortality. And there are no “valorization” issues in Ghana. Breadfruit
saved tens and tens of thousands of people, hundreds of thousands, perhaps,
from starvation or aid dependence in the 1983-1984 famine when all their other
crops failed and their Tahitian variety breadfruit trees kept producing.

Well the Muslims are celebrating Eid (‘festivity’ – there is only this one a
year plus the Eid that ends Ramadan) and the Yanks are all set to celebrate
Thanksgiving... the national starting gun for Christmas shopping.

Interesting work keeps coming in and I am transitioning to those in fits and
starts with the security of my children’s books production activities for which
hours are available to me any time I want to do some of that work.

slim surplus). So they kept my divers license and told me
where I could pick it up for $10. So "within a week" I had paid it
off at a facility that didn’t have long waiting lines, etc. But it was $20 – an
extra $12 for not paying on the spot. Not just an extra $2. And I didn’t have
it. I had the $10 and the standard don’t-go-anywhere-without-$5-for-a-flat-tire.
But some guy standing at the next window paying some dozens and dozens of slips
for a trucking company pulled $10 off the top of his LE50(=$11) stack that
looked about 9 inches high... and I was off and on my way.

The motorcycle continues to be an enormous source of convenience and continues
to cost about $2 a day – petrol, parts, service and licenses. And fortunately
none of my friends, rich or poor, have cars unless their work requires one.
Assim, Reda’s little-bit-rich cousin with the small downtown hotel doesn’t even
have one. Which is a great asset when Reda asks about when we might get one. I’d
say ‘Never. Lots of taxis are still cheaper than a car. And you don’t
have to park a taxi.’ Kind of moot points, though. We always take the most
dangerous-looking junky-looking bus before we take a taxi.

There has been one traffic ticket. It was an $8 ticket. Which I could have paid
on the spot (and left with my driver’s license). But I didn’t have $8 with me
(flat tires are only $4 for tube replacement and I think I had $5 or some
similarly slim surplus). So they kept my driver’s license and told me where I
could pick it up for $10. So "within a week" I had paid it off at a
facility that didn’t have long waiting lines, etc. But it was $20 – an extra
$12 for not paying on the spot. Not just an extra $2. And I didn’t have it. I
had the $10 and the standard don’t-go-anywhere-without-$5-for-a-flat-tire. But
some guy standing at the next window paying some dozens and dozens of slips for
a trucking company pulled $10 off the top of his LE50(=$11) stack that looked to
be about 9 inches high... and I was off and on my way.

I was at the motorcycle mechanic tonight. I’ve been around there a bit lately
as the return spring for the brake pedals age and give out after a couple years
– those factory-fitted from a couple years ago. But there’s a massive supply of
poor replacement springs in town and the shops are just kind of replacing them
once a week until they are all gone or a better supply shows up or something.
Now there’s the same problem with the rear brake-shoe retractor springs. So
possibly I’ll be stopping by the mechanic 8 times a month instead of 4. Or
maybe they’ll just replace both at the same time once each week for the
duration.

I was sitting in one of the chairs at the mechanic’s place reflecting on such
things when my eyes drifted over to the interior wall on which his tools are
hung. He now has two of everything... spanners, screw drivers, socket
sets... everything. Not just one. For the two mechanics who now make
their living there... not just him. Life’s kind of doubled up for him in
similar ways. Two years and three months ago he had a few Vespas (‘fesba’) that
he rented out. But then people like me started showing up with these new
Chinese motorcycles he bought two, renting them out, then a third and a fourth
and perhaps now a fifth and a sixth. And since all that was doubling nicely he
got a 14 seat passenger vehicle and has personally started plying the highways
and byways of Greater Cairo – they don’t try different things every day,
although they may be free to do so. They run regular routes, experimenting a
bit with others, to see how they might keep their van loaded most of the day
for the highest price. So his young brother-in-law, who he has been the second
man for two years or more, is now running the shop and training others and so
on it goes.

Not so different than Assim who added the 6th floor of his building most of two
years ago where the hotel/hostel was just on the 7th floor for the first five
years he had it open. Double the fun. Double the income.

The property situation is perhaps well out of hand now but it hasn’t yet
crashed like it did in America and Dubai and when it does it will involve
speculative luxury villas and apartments rather than the apartments most of us
live in. Too many in the far west of Cairo and too many in the far east.
Perhaps tens of thousands of them empty. As is true of middle and low income
housing but those have the thronging millions coming of age or immigrating to
Cairo to keep that market rather better balanced out. Reda and I hope for our
savings to intersect with the luxury stuffs’ prices’ demise on a two to four
year basis.

Some of the sleepy old kinds of businesses are going under. But there are
abundant examples of the world of consumerism coming to Pyramids and finding a
hearty reception: Arab and American fast food, car dealerships, appliance
super-stores, computer shops.

Otherwise, I have become the Breadfruit Institute’s ‘lead man’ in Africa. Which
pays for nothing… except for the sins of my past. See link below:

Six or eight months ago – yes, June it was or perhaps May – I told Reda and
various friends that I would then most earnestly begin seeking freelance work
from area translation agencies to do native English copy editing and that it
might be the end of the year before it came to much good.

I had been working since March or April at the closest translation service to
our house. But southwest Pyramids is not the place to be looking for work
touching up Arabic to English projects. I don’t know if I’m the only
"European" living in Pyramids but at that agency it’s all English to
Arabic – equipment manuals, doctors’ reports – things at a personal or small
business level that brings the outside world to them. So my time at the
translation office has been spent exclusively – not almost exclusively –
precisely exclusively – condensing Dickens and Shakespeare for Egyptian
middle school students.

I have a pronounced astigmatism which wasn’t diagnosed until I was 35 years
old. Long afternoons reading on the beach etc. resulted in sick headaches up to
that time which was when I first got glasses of any kind including all through
my school days and through a BA and two MAs. Consequently. Before the diagnosis
and first pair of specs I had little interest in reading for pleasure or
purpose, but did so laboriously when circumstances required.

So, with three different kinds of reading glasses I started reading Dickens for
this guy in Faisal (Pyramid’s northwestern most district) in February and, to
me, it was thrilling. Dickens’ use of verbs not normally associated with the
action described so often created a good bit of inner laughter. Adjectives not
normally associated with the noun in question. Same thing.

The Dickens was just delightful.

But though it was "a far, far better thing than ever I have done", it
paid almost nothing so by about May I was looking for a polite way out and it
was handed to me on a silver platter by the translation service owner himself,
Mr. Ibrahim.

He went to Mecca in May, and made the minor pilgrimage which is the same as the
annual Haj except you get less "credit" for it... but can do it in
less crowded circumstances. It was also a bit of a business trip for him,
selling elementary level books for learning English. The Egyptian and Saudi
curricula are similar to some extent and Dickens and Shakespeare are a safe bet
in Egypt because such condensations are required reading in the public schools
and the private schools as well. So in a town of 20 million people you can do
what you like and try to sell it to the schools for their (4-6 million?)
students. It’s all out of copyright and Shakespeare, too, which isn’t actually
Shakespeare. Every last public and private school in town is required to have
their students read Charles and Mary Lamb’s 1810s prose summaries of some of
the dramatic works, simplified for middle school second language students.

Never was there one single copy editing job. By April I was looking for a
graceful way to branch out.

The opportunity came when Ibrahim didn’t pay me when he came back from Mecca
around the first of June. And he hadn’t paid the phone or DSL or light bill
before he left which were going out one by one and I had started staying home
to do my work for him.

"You can’t pay me?"

"Not yet."

"Assim just got back from Mecca, too. He took his whole family. He couldn’t
pay me either so he sold his car." Which was true but involved his 10 or
so employees at his hotel, not just me.

"You think I should sell my car?”

"Yes. I do. I’ve got to pay my rent and feed my wife."

He said no more and I left for the day. Whether it is some sort of special
license to all returning pilgrims or just him... I now had the excuse to go out
to look for freelance copy editing assignments from other translation outfits.
Ibrahim and certain others (partners in his school book operation) had insisted
that I not freelance when I came to work 7 hours a day for them. But there had
not been a single copy editing assignment which is what I applied for (its
higher pay, specifically).

So, with neither income from copy-editing, nor, especially, getting paid the
little they owed me on time, I let my fingers do the walking, found the three
or four next closest translation services, sent them CVs by email, and walked
in a few days later, a new one each day for several days,
next-to-cold-call-fashion. They were like Mr. Ibrahim. They were delighted to
meet me in person and all offered work as they had occasion to receive
appropriate commissions. I had seen this with Mr. Ibrahim and by about that
time I was beginning to understand what it was.

They had all seen the big commission slip out of their grasp
because they knew no native English speaker doing copy editing work. So that
was my entree to all these places. The big one that got away. They were all
just delightful, as was my current "employer" when I first met him.
But I was beginning to wonder by then what good it could do if they would then
advertise "native English speaker copy editing" as they all proposed
to do.

Look for yourself. Do it now. Google those words and yes, it is moi meme who is numero uno in the world, right below the two to five paid placement
outfits. And this was true at the time I was making these forays last June. It
took me two or three months from about February to move to the top. But it
results in very little business. Nor had it helped my initial potential
benefactor, Ibrahim of Faisal, to bring any new English copy editing work to
his west Faisal service. We both have services that report to us about visits to
our web sites and I, El Numero Uno de la Monde on Google, gets hardly any
visits at all and just five, as I recall, actually retained me (and all paid
when I was done, thank goodness).

Mr. Ibrahim’s web site visits are most predominantly from
people linking through upon finding him listed in the online Yellow Pages – which
has no dedicated "copy editing" category.

My breaks began to come from two men I hadn’t heard from much since visiting
them in June. One had a major corporation’s web site for me to copy edit some
time during the summer and thought he would give me a try. His client was quite
happy but no word from him came again until about October when he and another
agency started getting in touch quite a lot and then, too, a quite wonderful
man with an agency in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia started sending me editing and
proofing as well. I asked the gentleman from Jeddah how he found out about me
and it wasn’t my web site. It was someone he knew in Cairo, who he didn’t
mention by name, who knew of me somehow and that, perhaps, is the heart of the
story on how people seek such services as well – referrals from other clients.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, I had moved on to A Tale of Two Cities and it was
a joy to get paid to read it. Condensation ran much the same as with Oliver
Twist and David Copperfield – getting rid of 8 page adjectives etc. and just
leaving Dickens’ other magical words alone. A Tale of Two Cities was approached
as with the others but it was a shock to see we would need 1700 definitions in
the glossary when we ran the software to see what was in there (that is, 1700
words beyond the 2500 most frequently words seen in English late elementary
curricula). I think it was 400 or less for the others.

I’m not an educator and hadn’t really noticed the difference
but Dickens was using a whole different level of vocabulary in Tale of Two
Cities (Oliver Twist and David Copperfield were first serialized in newspapers
or magazines and only appeared as books afterward).

Then there was the Shakespeare work and Charles and Mary Lamb’s ~1810
"retelling" which was just that much different than Dicken’s English
of the 1830s to 1860s that it isn’t accessible in the same way. It had to be
heavily edited and then to-ing and fro-ing between using more glossary items,
getting rid of a lot of their words with modern synonyms when they are a bit
archaic. A tougher row to hoe than Dickens.

The work will always be there if I want it. And I do. I worked at Mr. Ibrahim’s
office 52 hours in October, 50 hours in November and 52 hours again in
December. I had a difficult master’s thesis to copy edit over the past eight
days. A guy in a certain regional government ministry who needed a formatter
and typesetter more than he needed a copy editor. So I haven’t seen Mr Ibrahim
for a week except when he called me to come collect my pay for December.

We had a good laugh late last month. His wife had their car and was at the
school where she teaches and the battery had gone flat. We went down there on
my motorcycle and between my on board motorcycle tools and some nicer stuff he
had in his car we started working on the situation. But then his daughter got
out of the car and closed the door and his wife’s keys were then locked inside.
So I scrambled over to his apartment on my motorcycle to get his car keys from
the baby-sitter and got back rather quickly. The rush hour was closing in on us
and we were all laughing as one thing we did and then another had no effect on
the stubborn starter.

Then I saw Ibrahim was some yards away on the main road
flagging down a three-wheeled taxi ("toktok" – from India) and
assumed he was off to buy a new battery. But then he and the toktok driver
drove straight to the car and Ibrahim pointed to the battery under the driver’s
seat of the toktok. It was the size of a car battery so for $1 we took out the
battery, hooked it up in his car, and the car started right away. The toktok
driver got his battery back in place and blasted off to make money in the rush
hour and we got the car’s old battery back in place and blasted off in our
different directions, laughing, to see if we could get to our destinations
before the rush hour had the streets backing up badly. We’re pals, now, I
guess.

Reda and I are still fairly pitiful when trying to speak the other’s language...
getting better glacially. Her more than me because her secondary school English
is coming back in bits and pieces. I’ve got my spoken Arabic CDs and she’s got
her spoken English CDs but we’re both about 60 and don’t retain much when rote
memorization is involved. We have better luck spending time sitting together
with the dictionaries working back and forth on vocabulary we want to know or
want the other to know. Spelling out the Arabic word with the Quranic
diacritics and, for the English, the symbols of the International Phonetics
Society helps me most in terms of memorizing and trying to pronounce words when
practicing them on my own without an Arabic speaker at hand.

So life involves a lot of good faith, a lot of Google translator and a lot of
jokes and surprises. The utter failure of tonight’s surprise is what inspired
me to sit down and write a small wedding missive.

The man on the ground floor who sells salted fat and sugar to the students from
the boys’ high school across the street had been cleaning up the empty shop
next to his sundries shop and suddenly, yesterday, the unit he had cleaned up
was filled with shelves and counters and display racks of fruit and vegetables.
And he seems to be set to stay open 24 hours a day as most fruit and vegetable
shops do. Which is great for a lot of reasons. 24 hour security for my
motorcycle which is locked to the lamp post 20 meters away, for one reason. And
something besides Borios (an Oreos copycat) for when I’m ready for a snack and
a walk – which might be at 3 am because some of my copy editing work involves
largish overnight jobs.

I noticed yesterday that he had iceberg lettuce which I had noticed at a very
few other produce markets though more so lately now that I think to look for
it. I had been feeling low in a not-enough-veggies way for a number of days and
it was like a dream come true to see this guy’s shop open up. And everything
is in season now, though less so for some fruits. The tomato crop has been
fabulous as well as for cucumbers, capsicum and a number of other things I like
but don’t know their names. And there’s too much of all of it. The tomatoes are
20 cents (AUS/US) a kilo, vine ripened, picked yesterday, etc. and about half
of it rots before it’s sold. Getting a little overripe in the farmers’ fields,
I guess. I can’t imagine how little the retailers are paying for them. The
trucks coming from the farms can be seen driving the neighborhoods begging the
retailers to take them.

The produce shops have a pleasant way of just piling one’s small bits of this
and that onto their scales and charging a "salad" price per kilo.
Today it all cost me $2.50 after adding a kilo of bananas to the salad stuff.
If I really want to make Reda feel she’s living a glorious life, I bring home
bananas, milk and sugar. But today it was all about salad and I contrived to be
in the kitchen chopping it all up as she came home from work. Well, she arrived
and just felt invaded. Big disaster. And she thought it was a plainly
crazy idea to be using iceberg lettuce for salad when everybody knows it’s for mashi (the rice wrapped in grape leaves
one sees at Lebanese restaurants and Arab weddings... grape leaves, iceberg
lettuce leaves, cabbage leaves, stuffed into small hollowed out eggplants – dozens
of ways to make mashi, perhaps).

[here]So she fought the iceberg lettuce away from me, stuffed it into the
fridge, and then came over to the counter where I was cutting up the tomatoes
and started trying to grab the knife away from me because, as I understood her
to say, I obviously didn’t know how to cut tomatoes.

Egyptians will simply grab things from you or grab your arm and, with what
force they can muster, drag you away from something they don’t think you should
be doing. Well, I was not going to fight over a knife and came in here to the
office to write this instead.......

We’ve just had dinner this half hour later or more and there were tiny pieces
of iceberg lettuce in the salad. And they say contrition is puppy poop. Anyway,
she’s brightened up... which is what everybody says about her: "Kulliyom
mabsoota." (She’s always happy.)

We’re in a new flat again. This last general kicked us out early, too, saying
we had violated the lease by getting a land line telephone. And he only gave us
5 days to get out. I wondered aloud to my friends as to whether he had an adult
child who would be taking it or if there was someone offering to pay more.
"No," they all said. "Nobody wants you to put a phone in their
house. Or to get the electric or gas in your own name. Did it say in the lease ‘no
phone?’" "Yes, but why?" "Because some people will get
those things in their name and after 5 years go to the land office with the
receipts and say they bought the place but lost the papers. They never win
those cases. Or in some cases you can’t figure out who’s lying. But you can’t
touch them and it might take 5 years for you to get them out... all the time
getting no rent... all the time preventing you from selling it if that is what
you want to do... all the time wondering if the son or daughter you bought it
for is going to want to get married before you get rid of the other people. Nobody
wants you to get a phone in their house."

So here we are. Five weeks in our new place. Our concession to a legal system
that uses a soft hand when poor people or others make the aforementioned kinds
of claims. Many of them are illiterate but prove, in the end, that it was the landlord
who was trying to pull off a dirty trick. Actually our phone was never
associated with that flat’s address in the phone company records. It was a line
thrown down from the roof by people Reda works with at the phone company. But
it was a general telling us to go... so off we went. Up the hill in the same
"city of generals". Renting from a woman who bought the place from a
general years ago. Here the phone line already came down from the roof and
through the office window and there isn’t any "no phone" clause in
our present lease, anyway.

The move would have been a disheartening financial blow if not for this recent
blossoming of relations with the accounts that I developed last year. When we
decided not to take the general to court and simply move out as he was
demanding, we sat down to look at what our moving expenses would be. All up it
was going to be about $1000 which we didn’t have. The new landlady was going to
cut us some slack until January or something but that wasn’t the half of it.
But we just kept putting one foot ahead of the other and going through the
motions when two days later I got a large, short-time-schedule copywriting
project and then another and then another. I worked flat out at the computer
for five days while Reda field marshaled the house moving. My computer was the
last thing out the door and the first thing made serviceable at our new place
here. And the jobs I had by then finished paid $1100. $100 is huge money in
this part of town. Our "profit" from those days. $1100 in 5 days. But
it’s feast or famine. I probably won’t see that again for a while.

The flat is a mirror image of where we lived before. I was, for a lot of days,
walking out of the office and into the bedroom rather than taking a left
towards the kitchen and the coffee urn.

The snow storm in Jerusalem in the middle of December was a big howling sand
storm here. It took days to clean the house up. We were protected from strong
winds better in the previous flats but we’ll be glad for any smaller or larger
improvement in the breeze through the summer at the top of the hill here we are
now.

Reda makes the occasional comment of late about buying the place, but at the
same time gets excited every time she sees a banner advertising a vacant flat
on the bustling main street near the apartment building she built with her
sister. The air is much fresher here. The flats are bigger for less money.
There would be a place to park a car if we get one. But I do love the life in
town, too, and the new places going up on the empty lots in our old neighborhoods
all have basement car parks. We shall see what we shall see.

Reda’s got 96 days to retirement, she tells me. She acts like it and has ever
since her cataract surgeries in about June. Really took the wind out of her
sails. She takes a lot of sick days, now, that she maybe doesn’t need, and I
notice her office now has four desks instead of three and hers is no longer the
big oak desk for the manager of that unit to preside over (she got that job
only a year ago or so, "Yes," she said. "Madame Noor turned 60
and retired. And when I turn 60, I’m going to retire." She patted a small
pile of papers on her office desk that she was working on and said quite
happily, "We have to."

Ours is a Muslim marriage contract. There are no civil unions under Egyptian
law. One is married in church or mosque or synagogue and divorce (which the
main Christian denominations don’t allow) is also defined and implemented
according to the rules and practices of one’s faith. In a Muslim marriage
contract the man always signs up to "take responsibility" for the
woman "from" her family... her father or oldest male relative signing
her away. I’ve never asked about her income or what she does with it although I
suppose her nephew Mahmoud’s undergraduate tuition is a big part of the story.
Last year was just plain tough financially but whatever little bit I brought
home she made it last and allowed me the dignity of being the household’s sole
source of support.

She talked recently about wanting to continue to work somewhere after her
retirement from Telecom. Maybe she will. The nephew Mahmoud has another year at
the institute after this one. But I brought up to her a general vision of
traveling quite a lot. "We could be in Damascus for six months...
anywhere. My work comes by email. It doesn’t matter where we are." So that
was news to her. We’ll go to Mecca first. If we went anywhere else
outside Egypt first she would just want to be in Mecca anyway.

At the electronics and IT institute Mahmoud is fast learning to use the English
he was only taught to read K-12. And he’s settled down to studying and other
better priorities than a year (?) ago when he was demanding an expensive
motorcycle or car and just plainly couldn’t understand why his mother and Reda
wouldn’t buy him one. Danish kids start buying all their own clothes when they
are 14 and move into their own flat when they are 18. Which was also true of
the Yank-Danskers as I was growing up. Such questions of whether that is better
for the youth are moot. Young people don’t generally have any way to make
enough money to live independently here in Egypt.

I procured a 10-20 weeks Teaching English as a Foreign Language Internet course
in about June. A respected outfit and the certificate from that course would
have opened lots of doors. But – OH – sick headache. The course rather assumed
that one would either have other teaching experience or be prepared to
supplement, on a self-starter basis, one’s preparations through readings of
certain theory and practice of education stuff. I could see myself slowly
slipping behind on a 10 week schedule, then a 20 week schedule. I didn’t see
how I could get it done within the 6 month limit. I was 5 weeks into it and had
lost 5 kilos from stress (plus the 20 kg I lost, on purpose, when I came back
from Australia in 2008 – I was beginning to look like Uriah Heep). The 20 kilos
went by way of a lot of walking. Most of 10 km per day for 3 months. The 5
kilos in 5 weeks was from stress and loss of appetite from the course so I cut
bait.

But it all came good. I’d rather work at home doing the copy editing. The work
is very absorbing, time flies and I finish up, usually, the day I get the
assignment or the day after. I email it off and that’s it. I walk down to the
cafe and by the time I get there I can’t always remember the project’s topic,
even if it took several days. Don’t care. Don’t have to care. The client
agencies do all the marketing and billing. They pay within 30 days and before
that if I ask.

When I hear the phone beeping with a text message it’s almost always one of the
agencies as my friends are all too old to fuss with texting much and it’s a bit
of a thrill to hear the phone beeping upon the arrival of a new SMS.

My PhD thesis supervisors probably think it’s a big funny joke that I would be
copy editing anything. But I do it at a level that seems to strike a
comfortable place in the clients’ hearts. And I do. Yes, I do, feel like I’m in
a Bourne movie when a text message comes to me at a cafe and I have to blast
off on my motorcycle down desert roads to get to my computer and send a quote
off or, alternately, just sit down and do the job immediately because the
agency’s already promised a client that "their" guy would do so.

The motorcycle – 28,000 km on the mean streets of Cairo in 29 months. We are,
indeed, enjoying our second childhood together. We will go to the far side of
town tomorrow to look at sewing machines. But we will take buses and subways.
We won’t leave until after the noon prayer after which one has an hour or two
to drive around town quite easily but then we would be driving back 20-25 km
through full-on weekend traffic by the time we were done looking around the
markets. Not a place for the faint-hearted. We don’t even go to her sister’s
house 5 km away between 5 and 8 pm on work days. It’s not so much dangerous as
it is very slow going and hard on my hips to balance two on the bike when we
are at a standstill.

It’s the Coptic Christmas Eve tonight and we just finished watching the
midnight mass on TV. Pope Shenouda seemed to be wiping away tears, as well he
might. And the congregation looked gravely terrified. Perhaps 20 Christians
were murdered in a bombing outside an Alexandria cathedral as they left a New
Year’s Eve mass. I only heard about it a couple days ago. I finally had time to
get the TV set up with its dish that day and the first thing that came on was a
Middle Eastern Christian funeral with two or three caskets being passed over
people’s heads into a cathedral. The sound wasn’t working yet so I didn’t know
where it was. I had heard Christians were being bombed again and again in Iraq
in recent days but only yesterday came to know that the funeral I saw on TV was
more probably for some of the people in Alexandria.

If the God-damned Yank Congress and presidents would cry like this when Israel
cluster-bombed civilians in Lebanon and phosphorus-bombed civilians in Giza
maybe they would stop saying naughty-naughty to the Israelis and start telling
them to withdraw the settlements and fucking well behave themselves.

Europe is united. There the people believe that the biggest threat to world
peace is Israel. Except for the UK people who think the biggest threat to world
peace is America.

People no longer stand up when American ambassadors enter the room. Not in
Europe or the Middle East, anyway.

I just yesterday pushed the "Confirm" button on the Internet payment
that involved what I expect to be the last taxes I ever expect to pay to the
United States of America.

I shall never be helping to fund its violent adolescence on the world
stage again.

Why didn’t I know about the Alexandria bombings sooner? Because nobody even
talks about anything having to do with America and Israel. What
difference would it make? They don’t. I don’t. I’m glad to never give it any
thought at all... except upon seeing the tears of Baba Shenouda.

Egyptians wear long johns through the winter. They make all
the difference between enjoying Cairo at this time of year as opposed to often
wishing one were somewhere else. All my friends wear long johns. My wife wears
long johns. Her sister wears long johns. Our nephew wears long johns. Everybody
wears long johns. You don’t even have to ask.

I joined the legions and got some long johns for myself
towards the end of my first winter in Cairo in 2006, finally taking the
Egyptians’ advice a month or two before returning to Australia 15 April. I left
for Australia feeling like I had discovered an entirely different city. I no
longer got cold in the outdoor cafes in the evening when the breeze picked up a
little. I no longer shivered through the evening and early morning working
hours as I rattled around the house. People don’t heat their apartments in
Cairo. Not in Pyramids, anyway. We all wear long johns.

I’m not the first Des Moines Luther Memorial Church person
to have retired to Cairo. My parents’ great friends, Wilber and Cleo Williamson
wintered here, as I recall, more often than not after they retired. Or perhaps
it was somewhere else in Egypt and not Cairo.

As an undergraduate African economies student, I had been to
Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia in 1968 and first came to Egypt after West Africa,
East Africa, Ethiopia, Eritrea and Yemen in 1971.

I was a student in Enok Mortensen’s confirmation classes about
1962-1964. He was in Des Moines for a year or two, half time as pastor of
Luther Memorial, and half time gleaning bits of Danish American history from the archives of the Evangelical Danish Lutheran Church in
America Grand View College. I knew then that he was writing a history of
the Danish Lutheran church in America but it was only within the last year that
I learned of his many other books and I sent off for some of them.

Enok spoke to us briefly about something special one
Saturday morning, our small confirmation class meeting in the parsonage just
west of the Danish old people’s home, Valborg, and across the street from the
Grandview College women’s dormitory, although I don’t know what the latter is
now. He spoke to us of something he did when he was 17 or 18. He had come to
America with his family when he was 16. When he finished high school he got
himself to San Francisco, rode steerage to Japan and, from the Asian coast
somewhere, had taken the Trans-Siberian Railroad to Moscow at the height of the
Russian Revolution in 1917. He never said more about it than just those basic
facts. But it got my mind turning as to the things he might have seen and heard
when taking that route at that time and going onward to Denmark from Moscow. By
1968 when I finished high school I had also met Bob Shreck who went on to be a
famous cancer doctor in Des Moines. Bob’s tales of his Middle Eastern travels
when he was about 20 and I was about 15 also got me thinking I might do well to
go out and see a bit of the world.

I had come back to Cairo in 2005 to see if I might like to
retire here and I stayed the better part of a year. I was here in 2005 when Jyllens
Post published the Muhammad cartons. I saw the Danish products immediately
disappear from the supermarkets – yards and yards of empty dairy cases around
the neighborhood more or less immediately. I came back in 2008, retiring from
academics and getting on with my new life here. The Danish products had not
come back. Nor have they today. So neither can I comfortably tell people that
I’m American nor, since 2005, mention that my family was entirely Danish before
that. I had been living in Australia through the 1990s and have been a citizen
of Australia since 1999. So even before 2005 I had a more useful nationality to
mention than saying anything about America. Egyptians don’t often speak English
and when they do they don’t seem to notice differences in English dialects and
they commonly assume that I’m a native born Australian. I’m careful not to
disabuse them of that impression until they are aware that I am pro-Palestinian
and have been for a long time.

Ever since hitch-hiking from one Mediterranean youth hostel
to another in 1968, I had been witness to the common European opinion that
these settlements Israel was establishing in the Occupied Territories were a
cause for great concern. We young people in the youth hostels in 1968 swore
oaths to never visit Israel or buy Israeli products until the settlements were
abandoned, an oath from which I have never strayed. Charles de Gaulle, the
French President, had put it succinctly the year before: [Israel] is
organizing, on the territories which it has taken, an occupation which cannot
work without oppression, repression and expulsions… and if there appears
resistance to this, it will in turn be called “terrorism”. He was president
of a nation which had just seen over 100,000 people killed due to its colonial
project in Algeria – a project which France, in the end, had to abandon.

So there I was, late summer, 1968, properly concerned about
the settlements. But I was going home to where I had learned to swim at the
Jewish Community Center, had a very few classmates who were Jewish and had seen
a Jewish girl at our high school play Anne Frank most worthily some months before
in the drama club’s spring production. Enok had taken our confirmation class to
a synagogue the year he was in Des Moines. A pleasant rabbi spoke to us and
showed us around. My siblings and I were all aware of the Danes getting the
Jewish people of Denmark safely away to Sweden during the initial Nazi
occupation. I’ve had Jewish people point out to me that those Danish Jews had
to pay well for the help they received getting to Sweden… but so did one of my
mother’s cousins in Viborg when he went onto Nazi arrest lists after he and
another boy or two stole some of their troops’ rifles while their owners were
eating lunch.

From 1968 I’ve always had comfortable friendships with
Jewish people starting from that fall when I began university. I have never
felt it was difficult to separate Jewish rights and humanity from Israeli
government wrongs and inhumanity. I remember, especially, having lunch with
three Jewish people in Australia in the mid-1990s. There was an
Israeli-Australian who was glad to do long university years in Australia. One’s
time owed to Israeli military service was calculated according to how much time
one spent in Israel and how much time one spent in other nations where one had
citizenship or permanent residence. He was a lieutenant, I think, in the
Israeli army… and was called to service but little because he lived in Israel
but little. The second was a UK-Australian Jewish woman doing a PhD. The third
I can’t remember specifically except that it was a young woman and that I was
the only non-Jewish person there. It was all of them glaring at me for a
moment… me the American… when the subject of Israeli government excesses came
up. It was America that gave the government of Israel its license to steal what
it wanted from the Palestinians, not those Jews at that table or their families
or their nations.

I went back to America 1999 to 2004. I had not looked for a
pro-Palestinian American organization to join when I was back there previously,
1986-1991. But I certainly went looking for one in September of 2000 when Ariel
Sharon ascended Temple Mount under armed guard. By doing that he symbolically
proclaimed that there would never be an end to The Occupation, there would
never be an end to the settlements, there would never be a Palestinian state and
that East Jerusalem would never be its capital. Was he wrong?

Instantly there was the uprising in the Occupied Territories
and a good pro-Palestinian organization came looking for people like me in
those days. It was by way of the picture of the little Palestinian boy holding
his arms out as if with hand flags – or perhaps he did have little flags – as
he stood in front of an Israeli tank, blocking its progress as it advanced into
the little boy’s Palestinian neighborhood. It was the
picture the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC) splashed across
America in full page newspapers advertisements some weeks or months into the
rebellion. I immediately joined ADC and, with their help, I began searching out
Palestinians in the Omaha and Council Bluffs area where I was living and
working at the time. I found few Palestinians who could suggest anything useful
to do or say. Most of a year after Sharon’s fabled foray up Temple Mount, I
finally wrote to my senators from Iowa – Tom Harkin and Charles Grassley… I don’t
recall and response from Harkin. But I know it was Chuck Grassley who did because
I remember that he did reply by way of a forgettable six page corporate letter.
Had he come around to read it to me out loud, it would have sounded like a person
speaking with a mouthful of rocks. I marked up his letter with bits of red ink
and sent it back to him.

Then a few days later there was September 11th. I
was one of those 14% of American citizens or residents said, at the time, to
believe that we brought the attack on ourselves. Double dared them too many
times, in my opinion, then and now. Just asking for it. My blood
pressure shot up 30 points and only came down slowly over the next six months,
I was so enraged to have watched us do that to ourselves. I began to plot my
escape and worked especially hard on some Pacific Island prehistory topics that
might take me back to the Australian National University, a development that
eventuated in 2004.

I had been a polite guest of Australia 1991 to 1999. I was a
Meals on Wheels volunteer and a foster parent but did not get involved in
political issues… a spectator in “the recession Australia had to have” and
other politico-economic issues while comfortably ensconced at the national
university. But when I went back in 2004 it was as an Australian citizen
thinking of the future and I joined the Australian Capital Territory’s
Australians for Justice and Peace in Palestine (AJPP). Or, now that I think
about it, I only found them after returning from my 2005-2006 residence in
Cairo. Once again, a good pro-Palestinian organization found me. This one
through a poster on a pillar that I noticed when whiling away some moments
standing in a line for an ATM. I worked with AJPP for most of two years and
then came back to Cairo where I was going to have to plan out a cheap
retirement. I hadn’t had the consistent academic careers of Wilber and Cleo
Williamson.

I remember the years 1999-2004 back in the United States in
many ways but one memory that made me proud stands out. I was visiting Joel and
Karla Mortensen in Minneapolis. I was reading one of the Church and Life
issues from their coffee table and, like those in my mother’s (Anna Marie
Marck) home in Des Moines, it had some very useful observations on the plight
of the Palestinians. I mentioned it to Joel and he said it was our parents’
good friends Thorval Hansen and, perhaps,
Marvin Jensen writing up those articles. I remembered my father, Arthur Krog
Marck, mentioning that LCA[2],
or perhaps LCA and ALC[3]
jointly, had ongoing relief programs in Gaza. That conversation was in the late
1960s or early 1970s. I was glad to read the Church and Life articles,
to recall my father’s words and to think that one or both of the old synods had
kept some support going to Palestine and may have continued to do so after the
merger.

There were no feasts in Cairo when Obama nominated Hillary
Clinton as secretary of state. The Clintons didn’t even understand why the Oslo
accords immediately unraveled – they were either oblivious to the settlements
issues or felt that they didn’t have the political capital to deal with them
head on. Obama seems the same. His address to the Arab world in Cairo is only
remembered here for the inconvenience of having him in town for the day. Every
major road in Greater Cairo was closed. Obama’s speech was just more “naughty,
naughty” if he talked about the government of Israel’s culpabilities at all. I
don’t remember a word of it, actually. In any event, since that time, there has
been no effective American government action to reel in Israeli Apartheid
whatsoever. There is even the current fear that Obama will veto the UN Security
Council resolution concerning the settlements.

I’m older than Benyamin Netanyahu and I hope we both live
long enough to see the settlements and West Bank abandoned to Palestine as they
should be. That will be the price of America regaining some respect around the
world. For the moment the US government is kind of like mosquitoes in the
summertime or something. One can’t completely get rid of them so one makes
certain accommodations.

I never complained about the Afghanistan project but
wondered how America could possibly prevail when the Soviet Union and colonial
Britain before had failed to do so before. Thrice with respect to the UK. Afghanistan
was a failed state from which we had been attacked. But Iraq was a failed state
that had neither done us wrong nor had any relationship with Al Qaeda except to
keep it out. And where was the American government’s moral capital to be
mucking around in the Middle East, anyway? The Protector of the Shah. The
Funder of Apartheid Israel. Etc.

Boy W. George. The Great Connector of Dots. Conqueror of
Baghdad and Fallujah… Instrument of the Messiah… I’m not paying taxes for it
any more. Literally. A very few days ago I pushed the “Confirm” button on the
Internet payment that involved what I expect to be the last taxes I ever pay to
the United States of America.I shall neveragain be helping to fund its violent adolescence on the world stage.

My wife and I watched the Egyptian Coptic Christmas Eve mass
on TV about the 6th or 7th of this month, as we did last
year. The congregation looked gravely terrified. Pope Shenouda seemed
occasionally to be wiping away tears… as well he might. More than 20 Christians
were murdered in a bombing outside an Alexandria cathedral as they left a New
Year’s Eve mass. I only heard about it some days later. I finally had time to
set up our TV dish that day, as we had recently moved house. The first thing I
got the dish to pick up was footage of a Middle Eastern Christian funeral with
two or three caskets being passed over people’s heads into a cathedral. The
sound wasn’t working yet so I didn’t know where it was. I had heard Christians
were being bombed again and again in Iraq in previous days but only the day
after setting up the TV dish did I come to know that the funeral I saw on TV
was more probably for some of the people in Alexandria… the deadliest such
incident in over 20 years.

If the Yank Congress and presidents gave it a think when Israel cluster-bombed
civilians in Lebanon and phosphorus-bombed civilians in Gaza maybe they would
stop saying naughty-naughty to the Israelis and start telling them to
withdraw the settlements and jolly-well behave themselves. But I doubt that the
recent murder of scores of Christians around the Middle East made Congress want
to do anything more than what it is already doing… slogging on with their “War
on Terror.” Is that one up to a trillion dollars yet? Is the “War on Drugs?” I
don’t take much notice anymore.

Europe is united. There the people believe that the biggest threat to world peace
is Israel. Except for the UK people who think the biggest threat to world peace
is America. For myself, I think the biggest threat to American security
is the American Israeli Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). They have
successfully lobbied Congress to ignore questions of right and wrong for a
number of decades now. September 11 was just the beginning of the price America
continues to pay… the slow-motion knee-jerking that had Boy W. George invading
Iraq, for instance. Ignorant, violent, unreconstructed alcoholic that he is.
Spending trillions in the Iraq war and “War on Terrorism” whose most
significant effect will be remembered as that of driving Iraq closer to the bosom
of Iran.

Why didn’t I know about the Alexandria bombings sooner? Because nobody I know
in Egypt ever talks about anything having to do with America and
Israel. What difference would it make? They don’t. I don’t. I’m glad to never
give it any thought at all... except upon seeing the tears of Baba Shenouda.

TO HELL with the horsies the American Congress rides around upon. A president
who wanted to do right by the Palestinians wouldn’t be allowed to do so by
Congress.

It is one of the difficulties the Egyptian government faces
with its own population: the failure of the Egyptian government to complain
about Israel in any effective way. But the government is constrained by Sadat’s
Camp David agreements with Israel and both governments have promised not to
interfere in the affairs of the other… although Israel is scrambling to do so
now that President Mubarak may soon be taking a permanent vacation in Saudi
Arabia.

Egypt has at least 5000 years’ experience in distancing
itself from events in the Levant. But it leaves the government of Egypt in the
constant position of suppressing the moral indignation of its citizens who want
to ask why no one is doing anything effective about the government of Israel’s
theft of Palestinian land, life and liberty – and the question of why the
government of Egypt should continue such a cozy relationship with the American
government, a government which just goes on and on and on exacerbating troubled
Middle East situations.

The reason falls into the collective American lap, as the
Jewish people I was to tea with in Australia 15 or more years ago implied. The
government of Israel’s license to kill and establish Apartheid is a
specifically American Christian, ever faithful to AIPAC, license to kill.

The New Year’s Eve bombing of the Coptic cathedral in
Alexandria and the current flurry of email I receive from Australia and America
– about getting Obama to vote against Israel in the UN Security Council
showdown on the settlements – has me thinking about all this when usually I
don’t.

On a happier note, I married an Egyptian woman a couple
years ago. And she retires from the national phone company in April. A product
of President Gamal Abdel Nasser’s education reforms 50 years ago and more. Reda
did a two year electrical engineering certificate in an institute Abdel Nasser
opened up to women.

He personally visited her elementary school and encouraged
female education in what he said to those children and shook their hands, as
mentioned some weeks or months ago. So when I kiss her hand I kiss… It isn’t a
story the middle and especially upper middle class likes to hear. It was all
kind of Soviet and a lot of private land and production resources were
appropriated by the government without compensation for their full value and,
at times I am told, no compensation at all.

Reda mainly wears pants and capes and ponchos with her
headscarves.

It is almost certain in our Pyramids neighborhoods, that
almost any woman – or, especially, group of women – without headscarves is
Christian. I was telling this to a young Nigerian-American man who I took on a
brief tour of Pyramids suburbs some nights ago. “Oh, really?” he said, his head
darting about looking for Christians. There was one directly ahead of us by
about 20 yards. She was coming up to the bottom of the stairs up to the Metro
platform and he kept his eyes on her as we walked along in that same direction.
I had swept my arm to the south as we were walking a couple hundred yards from
the municipal bus we had taken from our home to the Metro station bus stop and
said, “There’s a big cathedral and other churches beginning on the next large
cross-street down there. Mostly the Muslims and Christians just kind of
comfortably ignore each other.”

“Look at that woman,” I said, raising my head and pointing
my nose at the possibly Christian woman his eyes had been following. “Nobody’s
bothering her. Look at the way she walks. She’s not worried about
anything.”

Egyptian Muslim city women were progressively giving up the
head scarf up to the time of the 1967 War. Then, like Jerry Falwell on
September 11, who came bursting out the door and blamed the attack on American
homosexuals and others. Many Egyptians couldn’t imagine that God would have
allowed what had happened to them in the 1967 War if they had been living right
just as Falwell imagined it was failures in American values that caused God to
allow the events of September 11. Here, from 1967, the women began to return to
their head scarves and the nation withdrew into greater religious
fundamentalism, just as America has in the last nine years or more.

Now there are some Muslim women giving up the head scarf
again. A very few and they are a bit like hippie chicks in certain ways –
seeking a more international education, world view and identity. Legions of
more and less educated young women are entering the work force and do not
marry, and do not marry, and do not marry and then they get to be about 35 and
there is the question, their embarrassed families’ question most prominently,
of if(no longer “when”)
they will ever get married. In most instances they continue to live with
their parents before marriage… even up to the age of 35 and beyond. They’re
supposed to and often do in any event.

I read some astonishing statistics about the number of never
married Egyptian women aged 35[4]
and some equally astonishing figures on the number of divorced women aged 35
who had never remarried. But then in that same, highly independent and highly
respected newspaper, I read an unquestioned quote of a well-educated and
well-connected woman. She, in the context of an increasing religious
conservatism (or “fashion” – did they call it “fashion” rather than
“conservatism”) discussion, said that ninety or ninety-five percent of Egyptian
women were now wearing the veil – which was certainly off the mark by forty or
fifty percent – an Egyptian proclivity for exaggeration that I am coming to
appreciate a bit more as time goes on. It’s as if people are surprised if you
don’t exaggerate when making a point… as if one isn’t doing a very good job of
it.

So maybe not all the women without head scarves in Pyramids
are Christian. And if their husbands’ wedding rings are gold, that is the
clincher. Muslim men wear no gold. Just silver. But it remains a good rule of
thumb. Probably my wife never went around without a head scarf before 1967. She
grew up amongst observant Muslims in an Upper Egypt city where she would have
worn a headscarf from her early teens or so. But like the legions of poorly
censused professional women of 35 years of age today who have never married,
she hadn’t married by that age either and never did until she married me.

This was all turning over in my mind as we walked mile after
mile in the sprawling suqs of Ataba the other day, looking for a sewing machine
and buying clothes. She picked up a few largish pieces of fabric that she said
were to become ponchos. I began to notice only about three months ago that
she’s the only woman I know or see on the streets who wears ponchos. Hippie chick
or something.

I asked her wonderful cousin, Assim, who introduced us most
of two years ago, what it would have been like for her to go to work for
Telecom with her electrical engineering certificate when she was young. “Forty
years ago?” he said. “They would have put her in the lowest job and kept her
there.” When we got married we rented an apartment near an area telephone
exchange that she’s assigned to so she could walk to work. She was punctually
out the door and on her way to work at 7:45 am on every working day until June
of last year.

Then one June day she came home with one of the phone
company’s health care purchase orders. Fifty percent of Egyptians are said to
have employment-based or other private health cover. Upon the advice of Yanks,
I imagine. One wouldn’t want, for instance, to be giving national health
insurance to one’s unemployed youth – or would one?

Egyptian economic statistics are quoted with greater
precision than social statistics (e.g., never married 35 year old women
estimates) and I have assumed that the “50%” with health insurance that I read
about is roughly accurate. So Reda (“warm satisfaction” – a both male and
female given name) showed me, last June, a Telecom purchase order with the
normal list of arthritis and other medications. But there was also a line that
said “Cataracts” which I had never seen on the forms before… a condition she
had never mentioned at all. She asked me to take her to the eye hospital the
next day and I said, “Sure,” assuming it was for a referral or check-up.

Off we went on the motorcycle – I got it four or five months
after coming back from Australia in 2008. Twenty-nine months and twenty-nine
thousand kilometers on the mean streets of Cairo. But it turned out that Reda
wasn’t at the hospital for a check-up. She was there for the first of two
cataract removal operations that would have her on sick-leave through the next
45 days or more. It kind of took the wind out of her sails with respect to
enthusiasm for her job. With only six or eight months left until retirement
after her time off for the cataract operations, she began taking more sick days
for less convincing reasons and was sent home without pay one day owing to her
late arrival that morning – which was becoming routine.

So she is well and truly ready for retirement and I’m
drifting into a routine of doing native English speaker copy editing for a few
Egyptian and Saudi Arabian translation services – work I get through their
to-ing and fro-ing email of all information and documents to my home. I will be
able to service those accounts from any place in the world with Internet
connections once Reda retires and we will start traveling.

Reda had no brothers and had never married before. Meaning
she, as an Egyptian women of her age, has never traveled abroad for lack of
suitable escorts. So we will be seeing the rest of the Middle East in coming
years. We think nothing of it. Fatherstake their sons to church and mosque and teach them right from wrong.
The murder rates in Cairo and other Middle Eastern cities are as low as in
Tokyo and Amsterdam. Except when people bring terror to those they think would
collaborate with Apartheid Israel and its guarantor – The Failed States of
America. The tears of Baba Shenouda. Any Christian becomes a target. My memory
of Christmas 2010.

I would have peppered this piece with more facts and better
spellings about Danish American Lutherans, American Christians and Jews (do you
follow Forward – a lovely, highly regarded American Jewish newspaper?),
Israel (do you follow Haaretz – a lovely, highly regarded Israeli Jewish
newspaper?), and Egyptian Muslims and Christians. But the Internet was down
through the night.

Following on the heels of the Tunisian Revolution of recent
weeks, Egyptian young people have been doing what they can to shut down traffic
in central Cairo for several days (10 or 12 kilometers away on the other side
of the Nile). A big push was being organized for today again, after a
relatively quiet day yesterday, and since all this is organized over Facebook,
etc., the authorities have shut down the Internet and cell phones altogether. I
will email this missive when email becomes available again, as is. Written from
memory and from the heart.

Egyptian birth rates are getting well lower than in the past
but of course youth unemployment has to do with birth rates fifteen and
twenty-five years ago and they were still very high at the time. So many young
people without higher education or without useful higher education are without
work or, at least, without well-paying work. And they’ve been busy for a day or
two trying to shut down central Cairo road traffic. Even 40 and 50 years ago
when President Gamal Abdel Nasser was asked what worried him most, his reply
was “3000 new Egyptians a day.” It is perhaps more like 4500-5500 new Egyptians
born every day now and something like 3500-4500 young Egyptians, on average,
coming onto the job market every day.

We were up all night, napping off and on, watching the
developments downtown on TV. The Friday noon prayers were called some moments
ago and I’m sitting at my desk at home where I can hear the sermon from the
large nearby mosque’s outdoor loudspeakers. Reda just now came into the room,
curious that I hadn’t left for mosque. But I told her there was trouble downtown
and it was better that the Egyptians go to the mosque, listen to the sermon and
talk it over afterwards without any foreigners.

Egyptians ask me about my past and why I retired here and
why I became Muslim. I’m fond of pointing out to them that I grew up in a
Lutheran church. There no book or person told me that Muslims were going to
hell or that there would be any way of knowing who was going to heaven and who
was going to hell. And that since I imagine I will one day die in Egypt, I
wanted to do so praying with them because their life here is so wonderful. They
find that quite astonishing. “Come on down.” They’re anxious to meet you.

The summer is too hot for all but the most intrepid visitor
(but you get very good price). October and November are nice as are March,
April and May. And December, January and February are also lovely (if you bring
your long johns).

Addenda - 2 February 2011 13:11

So we’ve got our Internet connections back.

I’ve been wondering if you’ve been watching the news of
Egypt these last many days.

Tell me the Egyptian people aren’t magnificent!

Tell me these young people aren’t pretty!

Tell me Obama doesn’t now have all the ammunition he needs
to fire Hillary Rodham Clinton and the American Israeli Public Affairs
Committee!

Tell me Obama shouldn’t be listening instead to that
wonderful ex-US Senator Mike somebody who spoke on our TVs from San Francisco
on about 31 January!

Tell me America wasn’t blindsided by the “rights” approach
while it poured more trillions into the military approach!

Tell me Enok didn’t show us how to open our eyes without
telling us what we would see!

Tell me these gorgeous Egyptian young people didn’t learn a
lot from studying the non-violence of the American civil rights movement!

Tell me the Egyptian upper classes and their children
weren’t taught what democracy is supposed to look like at their beloved
American University in Cairo!

Tell me the Egyptian lower classes weren’t taught what
democracy is supposed to look like in public schools that use American
models of civics!

Tell me this isn’t the beginning of the END
for Halliburton and the military-industrial “complex” General Eisenhower warned
us about!

2.5 days lost trying to get the password (which only(?)
Assim could get – but Mr Monsour did)

0.5 days setting up new ADSL modem

2.5 days trying to get the WiFi working

1.0 days waiting for neighborhood EEs to come look at it who
suggested LE450 modem

0.5 days of panic thinking the problem would never be solved

0.5 days real panic as it first occurred to me that
old modem may have been OK and it might have just been the power supply (and
praying no one had taken it out of the trash and figured out my mistake)

1.0 day home sick in bed

1.0 days trying again but using an old Chinese laptop to
test what I was doing (the old laptop not able to hold on to a signal, anyway)
– partial victory in the end when someone on the far side of the hotel got a
good signal but couldn’t log in – reprogrammed a little and went home, not
knowing if that last burst of activity had any useful result

1.0 days trying to switch home and hotel modems (we don’t
use WiFi at home but it has good WiFi functionality) – end of the day Ahmad
Salah, the evening shift manager, told me the same story as Mr. Monsour (which
I assumed was a misunderstanding) that Ahmad’s laptop was able to hook up
through WiFi at a good high speed – but hotel modem was at home which meant it
would all spill into another day – ISP network goes down.

1.0 days with the home modem back at home and waiting for
ISP functionality and then configuring back to settings for home – five or ten
minutes hooking the hotel modem up again at the hotel – worked instantly –
wrecked the rest of the afternoon fooling around with “access points” that I
was mucking up because I had forgotten how. Rearranged access points (little
boxes with antenna) to put the one with the biggest antenna directly above the
reception area, next floor up, where it also spilt nicely into the dining room
– finding old modem in computer room (someone had rescued it from the trash –
took it home – power supply tested function – unit was not functioning)

1.5 hours lost getting home as there were pro-Tunisian sorts
of demonstrations all along my normal routes and we were detoured all over the
place by the riot police.

28 January 2011 - Fri - Bastille Day - Egypt
27/01/2011

3:35 pm 27 January 2011

Well, it all broke loose after the Friday midday prayers
across the northern cities in the country.

I've seen little distressing violence on Al Jazeera English or the Persian
English channels which we might not have for long.

It isn't Tiananmen Square. The police are not shooting the people at the moment
and the army isn't yet involved at all. The police seem to be retreating and
regrouping rather than trying to fight their way into the crowds. They are
massively outnumbered. Or perhaps you know that from watching Al Jazeera or
PressTV, feeds from those two or coverage from Western news outfits.

The scariest thing I saw on TV involved occasional footage of civilians being
hauled off down side streets by three and five other "civilians" who
are not plainclothes police - they are thugs and day laborers for the
plainclothes police - and can, at least in the past, do what they want with
people they abscond with during demonstrations. In recent years, something like
five (?) years, 2000 Egyptians have disappeared into the hands of such people
and their higher-ups in the Ministry of the Interior and have never been seen
or heard of again.

The Internet was shut down, nationally, overnight and now the mobile phones
don't work.

Reda left, taking the municipal bus for her sister's house more than an
hour ago perhaps. The land lines are working and she's not at her sister's
house yet so I'm well worried although the demonstrations are most of 10 km
away and the ebb and flow of the day seems to be going on as normal in our immediate
neighborhood.

We don't have long distance on our home phone, by the way, so for the moment we
are incommunicado with respect to telephoning beyond the greater Cairo area
code.

Al Jazeera reports that the Internet is working sporadically so I'll get this
going as kind of a diary of the day and try to send it every hour or two.

4:07 pm - Reda just called from her sister's house. Whew. She had lost an hour
or two going to their largest area market. It was crowded with people stocking
up on staples so they don't have to leave their homes for basics. But Reda
didn't want to elbow her way through the crowds and went on over to her sister
Zuba's place.

Police have retaken a main bridge over the Nile in the last 20 minutes or so...
the 6th of October Bridge. Al Jazeera and the Persian channel are saying,
however, that the protesters now have the momentum at Tahrir (Liberation)
Square. They report that some kind of massive government concessions will
eventually be in the offing if the government is to survive at all. When I
first switched on the TV at about 1 pm I thought they were saying that the
Parliament building was already occupied but I haven't heard that again and may
have misunderstood.

Footage of Alexandria seemed to have the sound of automatic weapons going off
at one point. Alexandria is especially incensed with the regime these days.
Right about the time of the fake election two Alexandria policemen went into a
cafe, dragged out a prominent journalist and beat him to death on the footpath
in front of the cafe - right out in the open for all to see. Those two
policemen were never charged with murder or lesser crimes over the incident so
far as I know.

The October Bridge was retaken by the police with what seemed hundreds and
hundreds of volleys of tear gas rather than rubber bullets or worse.

I thought I heard the thumping of gunfire in the distance here in our neighborhood
but I stuck my head out the window and saw it was just a nearby woman beating
carpets on her balcony. My senses have lept to a certain unwanted level of
acuity. This is history and I'm very glad I'm here to observe it.

4:22 pm - The protesters have taken the bridge again. Surging from the Giza
side of the river, perhaps.

The networks are talking about the regime having signed its own death warrant
with the last election... which was a big, complacent, evil joke. I don't think
any international monitors or whatever showed up, it being understood by the
U.N. and the others beforehand that it wasn't something would call an election
anyway. It was just a couple months ago... if that long. And then there was the
Tunisian Revolution. The sun is getting low on this winter afternoon. I'm
wondering if more people will pour into the streets now that they see the
government is using non-lethal methods to try to clear the people from the main
squares, etc.

5:01 pm - The TV is saying police commanders are no longer present on the
streets of Alexandria and the outnumbered foot police are being left to their
own devices, handing over their weapons and shields to protesters and walking
away.

Protesters are burning armored police cars and such other police vehicles as
they gain control of. But I've seen no footage or heard any reports of private
property being destroyed. This isn't a general riot and they're not targeting
private property.

"They" are young people who put all this together on Facebook and
Twitter. Entirely without acknowledged leaders or notables. Joined now by both
men and women of all ages. They have no way of communicating with each other
for now but perhaps they're ducking into small hotels and shops, viewing the
situation on the TVs and reacting accordingly. They don't seem to have moved
around in groups much. Staying where they were just after the noon prayers and
holding their ground as individual projects.

5:15 pm - I had worried about the regime making good on its promise, today, to
confront the protesters with "overwhelming" force by which I assumed
they meant the army. But then the international TV networks emphasized that the
military is highly respected and would not sully its reputation saving the
regime. And, indeed, what seemed to be an armored vehicle of the army showed up
outside the Hilton from which Al Jazeera is streaming the 6th of October Bridge
Battle and the protesters, who are looking to the army to protect them from the
regime's police, ran cheering to the army vehicle and everyone started shaking
hands.

6:30 pm - A curfew was announced at about 5:30 for 6pm-7am. So Reda's stuck at
her sister's place for the night. Not that it would matter. All the shops
stayed open and children are playing in the street in this city of generals
that we live in. Nobody's observing the curfew.

10:30 pm - I slept for a few hours after sunset . The neighborhood is still ignoring
the curfew and I called Reda again on the land line. I said I could probably go
over there and bring her home but I'd rather not have to talk to the police for
any reason on a night like this, although the uniformed police have been very
restrained through the day. It's the plainclothes police and their day labor
thugs who have been a problem through the day... when there have been problems.
I think about five people have been killed in the last 24 hours... three in
Suez City (where there are always more fatalities for some reason) and two here
in Cairo, both, I think it was said, from getting hit on the head by tear gas
canisters rather than bullets, bludgeons, knives, etc. The army has separated
the police from the people and will now watch the city sleep. The protesters, I
suppose it was, have managed to set alight the large national headquarters of
the National Democratic Party, Mubarak's mob, which is right next to the
Egyptian Museum.

12:40 am Saturday January 28 - Well, President Mubarak just spoke for about ten
minutes on state television talking useless drivel so I suppose the
demonstrations will be larger after sunrise and we will once again have no
mobile phone or Internet service. I'm going to bed. Queuing this to
"Send" when we get our Internet back.

Good night and good luck,

Jeff

02 February 2011 - Weds -
13:11 - Internet is back

So we’ve got our Internet connections back.
I’ve been wondering if you’ve been watching the news of Egypt these last many
days.

Tell me the Egyptian people aren’t magnificent!
Tell me these young people aren’t pretty!
Tell me Obama doesn’t now have all the ammunition he needs to fire Hillary
Rodham Clinton and the American Israel Public Affairs Committee!
Tell me Obama shouldn’t be listening instead to that wonderful ex-US Senator
Mike somebody who spoke on our TVs from San Francisco on about 31 January!
Tell me America wasn’t blindsided by the “rights” approach while it poured more
trillions into the "security" approach!
Tell me these gorgeous Egyptian young people didn’t learn a lot from studying
the non-violence of the American civil rights movement!
Tell me the Egyptian upper classes and their children weren’t taught what
democracy is supposedto
look like at their beloved American University in Cairo!
Tell me the Egyptian lower classes weren’t taught what democracy is supposed
to look like in public schools that use Americo-European models of civics!
Tell me this isn’t the beginning of the END for Halliburton and
the military-industrial “complex” that General/President Eisenhower warned U.S.
about!

Oh, glory… Glory… GLORY!!!
Tell me what you will – jeff@jeffmarck.net

02 February 2011 18:55 - Weds - Protesters
hold Tahrir Square

Hi all,

About half of you wrote back immediately while I was out for
the afternoon.

I dropped Reda at her favorite Faisal neighborhood outdoor market and went to
the motorcycle mechanic.

He took care of a small problem and I then stopped at my carpenter's shop near
Reda's sister's place where she was to go by toktok after shopping.

The men at the shop were glued to the TV where street fighting was seen from
Cairo for the first time since things heated up a week ago. They asked me what
I thought so I asked, "Who will come after Mubarak? Gamal (Mubarak's son)?
This is Korea? The father. Then the son. And then the grandson...?" I
started plotting out a map in the air showing where Korea was and that it was
North Korea that I was talking about but I needn't have bothered. They knew
exactly what I was talking about and were glad to have that answer for the tips
of their tongues.

I saw two bands of sociopaths in our Pyramid neighborhoods today - 10 or 12 men
each - men the Ministry of the Interior hires to do their Cairo thug work - one
small band on Tersa Street in my old neighborhood. One small band moving down
one of the main avenues - Faisal or Pyramids, I forget which. They had placards
and were chanting slogans that they seem to have learnt imperfectly - all of an
age, 35 to 45, and wearing the same weathered coats, pants and shoes they wear
when they have disrupted peaceful demonstrations downtown over the years. The
people in the cafes etc. were just ignoring them.

But if you have a member of congress or parliament who might lend an ear it is
worth telling them immediately that this has been the pattern of suppression
for many years. True, otherwise unemployable sociopaths with black jacks and
sometimes knives - and the fired red bricks that magically appear when they do.
These guys leading the counter protests are simply the same sociopaths Interior
has hired for decades to suppress any gathering of opposition groups. Over 2000
people have disappeared into their hands in recent years. Hauled off and never
heard of again, just as you may have seen in the first days of the protest on
TV. It's Interior ("undercover" police, secret police, etc.) that
cooperate with American style disappearances of people and committal to torture
chambers, etc., not the Army, as I understand the situation. It made my skin
crawl when I saw those kinds of men on TV, hauling off young people down side
streets, etc.

I've heard not terribly distant gun fire every night but one.

But the networks are reporting no persons missing from downtown - but who would
know under the circumstances - or persons killed by gunfire in the neighborhoods.
If you're able to watch Al Jazeera English or Iran's PressTV you know as much
about it as me. CNN would seem to be staffed by corporate zombies for the
moment.

The protesters held Tahrir Square, night is setting in and there are, one would
hope, few people in the outside world who watched it all on TV and believed the
attempt to dislodge them was anything but choreography out of Interior. But the
numbers of young protesters at Tahrir now seems very small. If their parents
called them on the phone and ordered them to come home for fear of a
deteriorating situation... well... there's that aspect in all this, too.

I stopped by Reda's sister's place and picked up the groceries. She stayed
there so we don't have to fight over the TV's remote tonight.

The main checkpoints/"barriers" are getting more sophisticated and
the youth seem to have brought in police they trust, who are in plain clothes
but obviously savvy, to help them with their procedures and decisions. The
leader at the check point at the 1st Dobat entrance even wore the kind of
jumper police wear - of that style but not the Interior issue itself. I was a
distressing case to those polite citizens since I couldn't produce anything
with my Dobat home address on it. But they had routinely checked my backpack,
knew I had only groceries and the older ones left it to the younger ones to
talk to Reda on the mobile and see if she was telling the same general story as
me.

I wondered before all this what it would mean for us to be living in one of the
City of Generals (Dobat or Zobat Haram (Remaya/Pyramids)) if things came to
something like they have in the last week.

But it's Army generals who bought these flats, not police generals, and
everyone loves the Army this week and always has. The barriers within Dobat had
been manned all night by the youth up to about middle aged men, grandfathers in
lawn chairs on the sidewalks or nearby patios. Around here last night, well
inside our little town, they were down to one or two bored young men last
night. There's little amiss, apparently. The nearest mosque is some three
hundred meters away and has been broadcasting information to us from their
outdoor loudspeakers during recent days when we didn't go out at all.
Escaped prisoners - many prisons simply emptied out, one way or another - were
moving through the area and perhaps the gun shots I heard through those nights
were simply a rouse to discourage the escapees from coming in this direction.

Much army heavy equipment - tanks and armored personnel carriers - is parked at
the bottom of the hill we live on where they are at the ready to dash down
Faisal Street or Pyramids Street where there is other heavy equipment and their
associated troops. Nobody with nefarious purposes has any way to get into our
development without passing the main checkpoints where our two main streets
come up the hill from Fayoum Road, the initial leg of the national highway to
Upper Egypt. We haven't heard any heavy Army equipment scooting around this
high on the hill since the first night they were here, three or four days ago.
The bored youth of Dobat finally have purpose, patriotic purpose, in their
quiet evening gatherings at the development's larger and smaller internal
intersections.

So I will spend a quiet night, home alone. Reda's sister's place is deep into
the barrios and it's just the grandfathers watching the streets from chairs at
their doorsteps. The goon squads would simply be accosted by area men and the
goons don't have any reason to go into those streets, anyway.

Reda was watching "counter protests" on government television last
night but it was so obviously staged and the same 50 sociopaths playing up to
the cameras hour after hour. No women or children as there have been amongst
the Tahrir Square multitudes. All the fake counter protest men of an age - 35
to 45 - their signature, really.

I just went into the lounge room and watched TV for a few minutes... they were
talking about "counter protesters..." the young people making
citizens' arrests of these people when violent in their midsts and
finding, when they turn them over to the Army, that their national
IDs show actual employment with Interior in many instances.

Mostly we've just been at home fighting over the TV remote... switching back
and forth between Al Jazeera and Persian TV English broadcasts and the
pro-government Arabic broadcasts Reda prefers to follow. To her, Mubarak is the
designated successor of Sadat who was the designated successor of Abdel Nasser
who gave her education, opportunity and a career. All gave her quite a lot,
actually, and she burst into tears last night when Mubarak said he would not be
running for election again later in the year. The world, as she has known it,
is about to change. We had never talked politics before. No one ever did. Best
not to until only a few days ago, actually.

Breathlessly,

Jeff

04 February 2011 21:30 - Fri - From Cairo:
no protester deaths today?

My friends,

I dug into catching up with some neglected favors owed through last night so I
might have the utter weariness to sleep through the afternoon as things started
up for the day again. I went to bed just as the midday prayers were over.

Very hard to sit in front of the TV and watch protester bodies hauled off day
after day. But still, the toll now is said to be under 500 and perhaps as low
as 300 and I've now been rattling around the house for a couple hours and there
don't seem to have been any deaths of protesters or any others through this day
so far.

The killers are paid Ministry of Interior employees, actual employees.
And their $17 a day temp workers. True sociopaths that they are, they will quit
killing when the money for doing so dries up. And they all disappeared even
quicker when the Army rolled in a few days ago. It was the Army that stopped
the police killings.

Now that the American government has more familiarity with the costs and
futility of security-based approaches, and from Iraq to Pakistan their security
"partners" have been more or less telling them to bugger off in the
last many days, they might take note of the Egyptian uprising's rights-based
approach, its economies and its possible relevance to Israel-Palestine.

Netanyahu and the others just seem to be pooping their pants. The little
shit, anyway (I'm older than he is). I hope the little dag is just writhing.
Picture it. A writhing little dag. I hope he has a stroke like Sharon and they
both wake up in ten years to see the settlements have all been removed to
the Negev.

That's been one side of it that's just as well but for the many deaths we've
been counting day to day for what now seems a very long time.

Will Bush and Blair now politely drink hemlock and wander off to their rightful
places in the history books?

Probably not nor will certain other people who might well politely do so, too.
But their sins, after all, are not so great and were committed in the context
of America's conflicted and overpowering "principals" which had been
imposed on them.

Totally amazing to me is that Blair is still the "lead man", is it
called, for the "quartet", is it called? Who only a few weeks ago
said that if there was a two state solution Israel would get to keep the
settlements and Palestine "will get, ah.... ah…. what's left." That
is, precisely, what I saw him say on TV less than a month ago.

We still have much to do... foremost of which is to scream bloody murder that
Blair is the "lead man" of the "quartet" who, presumably,
awaits the nod of Washington before he does anything. Hopefully, Obama will
continue to be as irrelevant to the rights-based approach as he has been in the
past and American, security-minded influence will essentially end in the
region, the Iraq War now seeming to have driven Iraq into the bosom of Iran.

But there will still be Israel... and Netanyahu's soiled knickers.

This is just great. And it was the Egyptian young people, who I love, who did
it on the Tunisian model. Apartheid Israel's settlements may be removed to the
Negev before I'm dead and gone after all.

I was approached by a middle-aged, somewhat portly plainclothesman in front of
my apartment building yesterday in this City of (Army) Generals (Dobat,
Pyramids, Giza) and asked to accompany him in his car. We hadn't actually
picked the right horse or anything. My wife works just down the street at
Remaya Central, the central telephone exchange for Dobat and Hadaba, I think it
is called, and we live here so she can walk to work. I really never asked
questions about what kind of generals we were living with - sustaining the
fiction my wife and I lived with that such things didn't matter. It was an
enormous relief, some days into the uprising, to learn that they were Army
generals all. I didn't ask directly. No police generals. I forget how, exactly,
I found out.

So the plainsclothesman approached me yesterday and asked where I lived.

I pointed to the building in front of us.

He asked if I had a car.

I pointed to the motorcycle chained to the lamp post behind him.

He asked if I didn't know any better than to be out taking pictures at a time
like this.

I said, "I wanted one to show my house at the barriers. They don't all
know what the building numbers mean and then I have to call my wife and it all
takes a lot of time." He had witnessed me taking a picture, the last
in a series that I was taking - pictures of all the rooms in our house (built
to the same plan as all the others), the apartment number on the entrance door,
etc.

"Could you come with me please," he said, indicating his car and
retaining possession of my mobile phone which contained the offending camera.